The Top 10 Search Engines for Students

Finding a good search engine that you can rely on to use with your students is an essential task of any teacher today. While Google, Bing and Yahoo dominate adult search engine choices, they are not always the best pick for students. The sites in this top ten list are either specifically geared toward K-12 students, or have great educational applications for the classroom. Some you will know of, but some will likely be new. So, take a browse through some of the best search engines for students and see which one will best fit the needs of your class.

 Sortfix, (www.sortfix.com), is one of the more useful search engines for students because it provides relevant, streamlined search results. It does this by analyzing the keywords in the search results, and giving the searcher the ability to focus on, or remove, certain keywords. To do this, all you do is drag a combination of words from the ‘power words’ box to the ‘add to search’ box, or the ‘remove’ box. Then search again and you will see your total number of results drop to a more manageable and focused selection. If you are unsure what one of the power words mean, drag it to the ‘dictionary’ box and get a definition. You can choose to see Google’s search results, or those from Bing, Twitter and YouTube. Overall, this is a great way to search if you are not completely sure what information you want to find, or if you are tired of finding irrelevant results in your searches. Basically it is equivalent to an advanced search on Google, but it is visually appealing, and much more user-friendly for younger users.

 Homework help is always on hand with Fact Monster, (www.factmonster.com). It is an almanac, dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia all rolled into one. The results are always focused, to the point, and age appropriate for elementary and middle school students. The reference desk has an atlas and time line feature, while the homework center is designed to give you all the help you need to complete those pressing assignments. Games, quizzes, analogies, spelling tests and more mean that this is one full featured search engine for kids. More information about Fact Monster can be found in this article.

 Middlespot is a site that has very few rivals. This visual search engine, (http://middlespot.com), returns your search results as a series of thumbnail images. These pictures are live screenshots of the websites in your search results. You can zoom in on them by scrolling or sliding the zoom bar at the top of the page, or read the text summary for each on the left hand side of the screen. Best of all, you can save your results as ‘mashtabs’. This lets you save the most relevant results as a page that you can share with others, pan, zoom, re-size, group or rearrange links as you feel makes most sense to you. This is a great way to save search results for future use, and would be useful for ongoing projects. Used properly, this could easily be one of the best search engines for students to use at school, and a great asset for visual learners.

 Jeeves may be gone, but his legacy lives on. Ask Kids, (www.askkids.com), is a great site for students to safely find the information they need from the web. As well as being a useful and reliable safe search engine, Ask Kids also has a useful image and video search function that allows students to find school appropriate images or videos that may be useful to their information search. The Schoolhouse section even has a list of educational websites that are a great resource for students and teachers. These can be sorted by category, or subject, and include some of the best educational websites for kids. The Ask Kids site is simple, but effective, and most of the time that is exactly what you need.