Sad but True

According to an article linked at Ray Schroeder's Educational Technology News blog, "University students may be encouraged to be critical but they don't seem to question Google's ranking system, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication."

This is disheartening but hardly surprising considering that people are using the word google as a verb to mean "using a search engine to search the web." I cringe every time I hear someone use it that way.

As I understand it, Google ranks results based on popularity: how many people click on the link and how many other pages link to it. Popularity does not equal relevance.

Also posted at Issues and Trends in IDT.

Top 100 Tools for Learning?

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has prepared a list of the "Top 100 Tools for Learning" based on responses from 109 "learning professionals." I ran across the list while I was searching for references to AECT and Second Life together and got a hit that took me to the Centre's page for Second Life. I was excited until I looked at it more carefully.

It's hard to take the list seriously when Tool #4 with 37 mentions is Google's search engine. The next "search engine" listed is Dogpile (#98), which is a metasearch engine or metacrawler not a regular search engine, anyway.

Ask.com and Exalead are much better search engines than Google, but I always advise my students to use metacrawlers (like Dogpile, Kartoo, Clusty, and Ixquick) or directories instead. They get much more relevant results that way.

Also posted at Issues and Trends in IDT.