On Search Engines and Hoaxes

Today we looked at comparing search engines and figuring out the validity of websites and their information. The search engine comparison was an interesting project--I haven't used anything but Google since HotBot was a big thing. I found that Altavista/Yahoo, Bing, and Ask all have the first few results the same (in different order), but start varying widely after that. Also notable is the question of news and image searches, which are possible on Bing and Ask, but not Altavista (though news results did appear at the bottom of the first Altavista page). I also noted that Ask focused differently: the first result for "presidential election" was the 2008 election, not 2012, and it was the only search engine to list information on other countries' presidential elections on the front page. I also noted that Ask seems to still be a "safe" site, as looking up "Santorum" on Google, Altavista, and Bing all had the... rather adult slang term named after the politician as their first result, while Ask focused entirely on the politician himself. In short, while I use Google for most things, I may now try other sites if I'm unable to find what I'm looking for on Google.

Looking at hoax sites, I think the most important piece to discern the truth is verification by outside sources. Find what sources a website cites. Check out what other sites say about this site, about its facts, about its author. Perform some critical thinking, or you may end up trapped by a purely fake site like Malepregnancy.com or, even more dangerously, a place written genuinely but with dangerously slanted information like martinlutherking.org. It was an interesting project, even though the site I was assigned was absurdly easy to discern as a "fake"--especially given that its purported subject, Ruritania, is a very famous fictional country, and that it labels the site as a "simulation" right at the top of the homepage.

Our work with the CPS(?) "clicker" system was interesting--it's nothing I've ever worked with, but it seems like it would be a useful system. I am most interested in using it to check understanding, asking children "did everyone understand?" and allowing a student to show they do not understand without calling attention to themselves.