Surf canyon – refine your search results with a bullseye!

Just found this cool little tool while browsing through Download Squad. It’s called Surf Canyon and what it does is to find good search results from the pages in search engines that you’re not likely to look at. Let’s face it, anyone working with kids these days would have to be noticing that they are not likely to search through the entire first page of Google results, let alone move onto pages 2, 3 or 4. I do try and search beyond the first page, but I’d suggest I’m in the minority! I remember asking students last year how many of them looked beyond the first four results from Google – there were less than five hands raised from a class of 24 or so.

That’s why I’m keen on exploring the possibilities of Surf Canyon. Once you’ve downloaded it (it works for Internet explorer and firefox) you will find a bullseye icon appearing next to the results you have received. When you click on the bullseye, you will find ir opens three search results recommended by surf canyon for the keyword you have searched for. Next to each result also appears the page number the result was on. Here’s what I found when I searched myself! and clicked on the bullseye.

This would be a great tool for teachers to use to help demonstrate to your students how a relevant search term could be hidden on page 7 of your search results. I need to play around with it a bit more to see if it returns relevant results on a regular basis, but it looks like an interesting tool that I could use for instruction.

Thanks Drew Orlanoff from Download Squad for the heads up.