Redzee - And if one new search engine wasn't enough...

Redzee was brought to my attention by jdblack64 in a Tweet. When you first reach the site, you're greeted by a cute animated zebra, a red and white one, thus the name Redzee for the site. He's fun to watch for a few seconds and the younger kids will surely enjoy him. But the "wow" of the site begins when you enter in your search. Instead of the traditional listing of sites appearing, you get an arc of screen shots from sites that have matched your search criteria. To navigate through the results, you use your mouse to drag them to the left or right.



After the "wow" effect wore off, I began thinking about filtering for our students and wondering if this method of searching would result in our students being able to bypass it to show front pages of pornographic websites. I performed a few basic searches using keywords like pornography, sex, and porn, and all of them failed to produce results. Even sites that are blocked under normal search conditions remained blocked.

I won't be giving up Google at any time, but it is a very different way to navigate the net. What I would really love to see is a mashup of this site and all of my del.icio.us links.

Kart00 - Sweet little search engine

kart00
Originally uploaded by cobannon71

Kart00 is a search engine that gives you your results in a "mind map" type format. What I found very interesting about the results window is that the pages it finds are presented as small icon screen shots and are attached to blob-like bubbles that represent categories within your search.

In addition to the results in the main window, to the left you'll find other related categories. If you hover your mouse over them the links in the main window pulse, for lack of a better word. As you click through some of the categories, new ones appear. It's worth taking a look at and would be very interesting to show students the related categories their search comes up with that they may not have thought of themselves.