Thing 10: Search Tools Ninja

I decided to try duckduckgo because I teach High School students (and I'd never heard of it before!). I liked the ease and simplicity of it - and it even reminded me of a google search. I also liked how the safe search options were right at the top of the page - I didn't need to search around for it in the settings.

Here is the link to my custom music search: https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=008407749930667759192:4x3jyk0odny

I compared the search of "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart" across three different search engines: duckduckgo, smartpage, and sweetsearch. Here is what I found:

1. duckduckgo: only 1 ad at the top of the search. First 3 sites that came up were wikipedia, britannica.com, and biography.com
2. smartpage: 3 ads at the top of the search! First 3 sites that came up were wikipedia, britannica.com, and biography.com
3. sweetsearch: 4 ads at the top of the search! First 3 sties that came up were britannica.com, biography.com, and classicsforkids.com.

So, there were a lot of similarities, but I definitely like 1 or 0 ads, so duckduckgo was the winner for me. I also found it interesting that sweetsearch omitted wikipedia. 

This was a fascinating subject. Before investigating, I wasn't sure how I would use something like this in my classroom. I'm glad I chose Thing 10 because it has been one of the most useful sections.