01/23/00

Jeff Roslow column

Search this

If you really want the answer and can take a little time to research it, you don't have to Ask Jeeves. Check out an outfit called SearchEdu.com. It is part of a search engine company that Troy Beckstrom said has the goal of making searching the Internet more relevant.

Launched Jan. 14, the site can be found at:

http://www.searchedu.com/

It is the third search site the Internet search engine technology company MaxBot.com has launched since it was founded in November. And with 20 million pages indexed, it is by far its largest one.

"It's pretty heavy-duty," Beckstrom, the company's co-founder, said about the depth of the education search site. "It seemed like a pretty underserved area, and in using other (search) sites, it has been difficult to find stuff because it's all over the place."

By comparison, SearchEdu.com has more than three times the number of pages indexed than MaxBot.com's other two sites -- SearchGov.com and SearchMil.com -- combined. The government search site has 5 million pages indexed, while the military search site has 900,000 pages indexed.

And though SearchMil.com has gotten him a lot of positive feedback and "a lot of respect" from individual veterans and veterans organizations, SearchEdu.com is bound to be greeted with a tenfold response because of its resources and breadth, Beckstrom believes.

"I've gotten so much happy feedback from people about the military search, especially the way it returns in a ranking order, that organizations are calling from all over to put it on their sites," he said.

He's hoping for the same response from the education community.

Essentially what SearchEdu.com does is return searches that rank results starting with the most relevant. It saves pages in a cache on its site for faster downloading on future searches. Each item is accompanied by a short explanation, including the search words in their proper context. That way, Beckstrom explained, users can see whether the hit matches what they're looking for without having to go to the site.

If you choose, you can search for your terms from a variety of sources, including the World Wide Web, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Thesaurus, Encarta Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, Info Please Encyclopedia and Almanac and A&E biographies.

In addition to all that, you can do more than just a search.

The sit includes an alphabetical listing of colleges and universities worldwide. There are a myriad of calculators and online currency converters, as well as links to such sites as the Librarians' Index to the Internet, the CIA World Factbook, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Library of Congress' online card catalog.

My favorite link from the site -- a new one to me -- is a site called A Web of Online Dictionaries. Here you'll find the right translations for words and phrases in 223 different languages, including the ones that don't use Roman letters -- Asian languages, Hebrew, Arabic and Uqoi. And, you can, just for fun, get translations into Romulan, Klingon, Vulcan and Tolkien-speak, for you "Hobbit" fans.

However, you must be warned. I did search for naughty words to see if this site can earn the Good Housekeeping seal. The slang search will give you enough variations to make a school janitor blush and a parent potentially angry, especially when searching the Info Please Encyclopedia and Almanac, the dictionary and the thesaurus. But these research sources were available in schools long before Merriam-Webster went online. I remember giggling at the sight of these words in the dictionary when I was in the sixth grade.

The big question, though: How well does this site work?

Last week I was searching for links about charter schools. The newspaper ran stories last week on the Sarasota County School Board's vote for to apply for charter district status and another story on how Charlotte County's only charter school -- the Alpha Center -- is doing halfway through its first year.

I did a search using the terms "Charter Schools" and "Florida."

The returns were nothing short of stunning. The first two sites (ranked 1 and 2) were the Sarasota County Charter District Information Page and the text of the Sarasota County Charter District plan. Other returns gave me the text of the 1998 Florida Charter School Law, the state's Office of Charter Schools and literally hundreds of other relevant pages. I had a tough time choosing which links not to use with the online version of the story.

This is not to take anything away from the Northern Lights and Yahoo! search engines, but for a specific subject concerning education, the early grade of this site is A-plus. The relevancy percentages seem much higher than competing search engines.

Beckstrom said his company's next project is to put together a search engine for online shopping sites and index it by content.

"There are a lot of sites that do store searches, but none let you search by the category of the item you're looking for," Beckstrom said.

He said this is because the work has to be done by hand and it is tedious. His company has developed a way to do it by machine, and with millions of online shopping sites to index, I would guess he could get that done faster than someone working by hand.

You can e-mail Internet Editor Jeff Roslow at roslow@sunletter.com