Phil Bradley spends a lot of time checking out new offerings in the Web world, so when he starts a post by saying;
It’s not that often that I’ll just sit and work my way through a search engine these days and go ‘ohhh!’
you know that what he’s talking about has gotta be good! This was his reaction to Silobreaker, a news search engine that I think is going to be really useful for both teachers and students. Here’s what the team at Silobreaker say about what they offer;
Silobreaker provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user. The graphical search results enables users to quickly and easily understand connections, trends and topics or navigate deeper into the most relevant stories for them. No other news search service provides such an extensive suite of contextual tools in the industry today.
I love the look of the page when you get a search result. It’s highly visual, with extensive use of graphs and maps and YouTube videos embedded in the page. This will appeal to our students who almost baulk at the appearance of copious amounts of text on a page with no pictorial detail which is what our current databases offer. YouTube is blocked at our school, but teachers have access and could use it in classes with data projectors and interactive whiteboards.
Phil ends his post by saying, “In short, this is a magnificent news search engine, and has, in a stroke, just blown away the competition.”
Give it a go – I’m going to be using it with my students this year.
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 