Colette Cassinelli’s edtech VISION

According to Bare Bones 101, the definition of a Portal:

Portals are directories that have been created or taken over by commercial interests and then reconfigured to act as gateways to the web. These portal sites not only link to popular subject categories, they also offer additional services such as email, current news, stock quotes, travel information and maps.

Some of the best examples of portals are Yahoo, AOL and MSN. These websites want you to use their page as your home page. When you open up your browser – everything is there: mail, weather, news, stocks, etc.. The only problem is that most of the content on the front of these pages are “sponsored links”. The pages are busy and have a lot of ads.

With the invention of personalized homepages like iGoogle, MyYahoo, MyAOL, Pageflakes, Netvibes, and Windows Live – I think we will see less and less use of the traditional portal page. If you already have a Gmail account, you should definitely set up your iGoogle page. It’s fun to add new widgets for mail, calendar, RSS, weather, joke of the day, etc. I get to choose what’s on my homepage. I don’t need MSN to tell me what to read or look at anymore.

Image source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/24/the-personalized-homepage-war-who-matters/

Remember what the Yahoo website looked like 10 years ago? No? Just go to “The Wayback Machine” and you can pull up an archived version of their page. A sample is here (right). Remember how Yahoo “attempted” to organize web sites into categories. First you would start in a subject area like Science … then click on a category like Astronomy … then finally to a huge listing of websites?? Takes you back huh?

According to Bare Bones 101:

Subject directories, unlike search engines, are created and maintained by human editors, not electronic spiders or robots. The editors review and select sites for inclusion in their directories on the basis of previously determined selection criteria. The resources they list are usually annotated. Directories tend to be smaller than search engine databases, typically indexing only the home page or top level pages of a site. They may include a search engine for searching their own directory (or the web, if a directory search yields unsatisfactory or no results.)

Today, the line between subject directories and search engines is blurring. Most subject directories have partnered with search engines to query their databases and search the web for additional sources, while search engines are acquiring subject directories or creating their own.

For example, look at these 3 versions of Yahoo:

• http://www.yahoo.com The traditional busy Yahoo page that gives you news, mail, weather, and a list of categories on the side bar.
• http://search.yahoo.com A cleaner, simpler version of Yahoo’s search.
• http://dir.yahoo.com/ – The directory version of Yahoo

One of the best subject directories out there is the Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org/. The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. From their website:

The Open Directory was founded in the spirit of the Open Source movement, and is the only major directory that is 100% free. There is not, nor will there ever be, a cost to submit a site to the directory, and/or to use the directory’s data. The Open Directory data is made available for free to anyone who agrees to comply with our free use license.

The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web’s largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.

Subject directories are best for browsing and for searches of a more general nature. They are good sources for information on popular topics, organizations, commercial sites and products. When you’d like to see what kind of information is available on the Web in a particular field or area of interest, go to a directory and browse through the subject categories.

Some other subject directories to check out:

• About – http://www.about.com/
• Librarian’s Internet Index – http://lii.org/
• Google Directory – http://www.google.com/dirhp (Notice it is the same info as The Open Directory Project)

Next up: Portals …

From Bare Bones 101: A Basic Tutorial for Searching the Web

Metasearch engines do not crawl the web compiling their own searchable databases. Instead, they search the databases of multiple sets of individual search engines simultaneously, from a single site and using the same interface. Metasearchers provide a quick way of finding out which engines are retrieving the best results for you in your search.

One of my favorite Metasearch engines is Dogpile. Dogpile was launched in 1996 but it is currently operated by InfoSpace. Dogpile searches the Web by searching the databases of the Internet’s top search engines: Google, Yahoo! Search, Ask, Live Search, About, MIVA, LookSmart, and more.

On the main page of Dogpile are options to search for “Web”, “Images,” “Audio,” “Video,” “News,” “White Pages,” and “Yellow Pages”. First you type in your keyword (such as Portland Trailblazers) and then the results of your search will be listed by relevance. The results display a short description of the site and which search engine database retrieved the listing.

Some special features:

• The site will offer suggested spellings for words that may be misspelled and automatically corrects commonly misspelled keywords.
• Dogpile blocks potentially explicit content for multimedia searches in Moderate setting and for all searches when in Heavy setting.
• For most search results, Dogpile provides you with a list alternative search terms under the heading “Are you looking for?”
• The Recent Searches area allows you to view your previous search terms (15) and then click to retrieve past results quickly without having to re-enter in your search terms into the search box.

The only downside is that Dogpile ‘s results include sponsored (paid) listings for some keywords. Students might not be aware that these are sponsored links since they are NOT very well marked and interspersed throughout the search results. When I searched for Portland Trailblazers, the second listing was a sponsored results for a “trailblazer” car. Not exactly the type of listing that should be at the top of a search about a basketball team!!!

Like the other leading search engines, Dogpile primarily makes money from sponsored links and advertisements but the fact that they include Sponsored Links throughout the search is fairly new and may deter me from recommending the site in the future. The jury is still out on that one.

Some other Metasearch engines to check out:

• Mamma – http://www.mamma.com/ “The mother of all search engines”
• Clusty – http://clusty.com/ (formally Vivismo)
• Kartoo – http://www.kartoo.com/ A visual search engine that displays results like a mind-map.
• Listing of Metasearch engines from Search Engine Watch