Please help us with this.

[Dos_Box]

This is a piece of software currently being worked on that we have been asked by Wagumo to get involved with. It is currently called Bamboo (as a working title), and is a search engine. Primarily it is a search engine which utilises other search engines and delivers the results in a rather nice Silverlight interface. It currently offers you the ability to annotate searches and save them as PDFs, as well as link to videos, pictures etc. Anyway, the link is here:

 

Bamboo Link

 

And the login is:

 

[email protected]

 

[email protected]

 

Password: demo

 

What we need from you is feedback. What features would you like to see, what does it currently not do, and more importantly a name!

Ric and I spent last night in a rather nice meeting with David and Justin from Wagumo thinking up ideas to add to it and came up with these (remembering that all ideas must have an educational direction):

 

1. The ability to weed out irrelevant sites and articles and save searches so they can be given to pupils. This way teachers know that the searches contain all of the information the pupils require.

 

2. Enforce safe searches.

 

3. Have a search strings box so staff and pupils can learn to search correctly and insert strings easily with a definition of each command visible next to each.

 

4. Develop a repository of searches so that subjects can have lots of information readily available.

 

5. Plug into Espresso, Knowledge Box, Moodle and Pathe News etc so that locally (within the school) held content can be scanned too.

 

6. A free (lite) version

 

Anyway, it's over to you now. We want to know what you think, how it can be improved, and most importantly, what would your school be willing to pay for it if it had the features you wanted included. This could either be as an annual cost (small) or a one off (larger). We had discussed the pricing having 2 levels to accommodate primary and secondary schools, but this price would be site wide and allow pupils to use it at home too.

[apoth0r]

link doesnt work for me

[Dos_Box]

Oh, I forgot. You will need Silverlight installed to use it!

 

The Official Microsoft Silverlight Site

[Dos_Box]

link doesnt work for me

 

The link is good. What is the error?

[plexer]

Ok who searched for big and bouncy?

[Dos_Box]

Heh, As I said, safe searches will be enforced in later revisions!

[Arcath]

maybe link it in to the clients filtering system? so results from http://www.suspectwebsite.com dont get displayed as results if they filter that site in school

[Ric_]

Ok who searched for big and bouncy?

 

It was a test! The filter caught it

[Midget]

well thats very swish looking

 

although i do wonder what Adam Internet has to do with edugeek

 

I like the anotate feature too, that was a good idea

[Ric_]

Surely somebody thinks that it would be useful in a school environment... and has an opinion on how much it should cost?

[Dos_Box]

although i do wonder what Adam Internet has to do with edugeek

 

Eh? Who?

[Dos_Box]

We really need your comments and suggestions guys. remember, what you currently see is a base to be built on. If you want a feature in there please let us know. And as Ric said, please let us know what you would think something like this would be worth to your school if it had the features you required.

[srochford]

Probably being stupid but what's the point? I'm sure the flakiness is down to it being a test platform (just tried logging in 3 times; only 1 worked. I've made a few searches; only 2 worked and I'd have got better results using just one search engine!)

 

Not sure if it's configurable, but the small box is a real pain - if you type more than 2 words they scroll out of site so you can't see what you've typed.

 

Started writing this about 10 minutes ago and stopped because I couldn't get to the web site - I still can't. Don't know if this is because the test server is overloaded or if it's just fallen over.

 

Just re-reading your original notes, why would you want to give a saved search to pupils? Surely you want to teach pupils how to search??

[Dos_Box]

I'm surprised you are having problems! Are you using Sliverlight 1 or 2?. It's been workign flawlessly for me for days now and still is. The point of begin able to save searches is mainly for primary school pupils where they can search through a predefined search to gather the information they need. For example, history lessons are not lessons in searching the web, but id you can save, say 100 pages on the Tudors and have your pupils search those for information you know is there they will find more than spending 3 times as long trying to filter the information themselves.

[Ric_]

@srochford: You critisisms are exactly the type of thing we are after.

 

What I would envisage the product being used for is as a tool for teaching searches. A feature to be written in is the ability to save a search and allow the students to follow the same search the teacher has previously - basically putting 'dead ends' in the route when the results start to become irrelevant.

[PiqueABoo]

Haven't looked at it, but out of interest how does this meta-search thingy sit with the underlying search engines? Used to be they didn't like them at all because you're getting people what they want without them seeing all the Ads that are of course a key part of their business model

[Dos_Box]

The developers have the Google and Live APIs, so they don't just scrape the results from a direct search. The product itself is actually quite powerful and can search Sharepoint installs and pretty much anything you point it at. Stop thinking about this as a search engine, but as a schools search tool\resource, and it will have features aimed at making it more educationally sound. So far we have had several criticisms, but not one suggestion on how to improve it as to something schools would find useful. Come on guys, you are usually very good at tearing things to pieces and then telling manufacturers how things should be. That's what we need here.

[apoth0r]

Ok got it working, had to restart for silverlight 2.0

It looks good i have to say, interesting spin on displaying results, however, is it much of a muchness for searching? Google revolutionised it by making it simple.

I spose it could be handy for in a school library to display books or something but im pretty sure people are so used to Google, they wouldn't go anywhere else.

I'd be interested to have a further play and see what more of an opinion i can generate.

[srochford]

OK. Now tried it a bit more. Trying to search for "measure river flow rate" (A Level Geography type exercise) - it appears to search for ages but returns no results (same words in Google give lots of hits instantly)

 

Next was "crusader castles syria" - this does give a load of results but how do you use them? I can click on (say) Crac des Chevaliers and then open and I get a load of blurred RSS icons. If I persevere and scroll through them then eventually I get some blurred pictures followed by blurred wikipedia pages. I can click on those and then "open item" (why not just double click??) but nothing happens (well, actually, it tells me that it can't open the page because pop ups are blocked). Why on earth is it trying to use pop ups? Does anyone actually allow pop ups from random web sites??

 

Sorry; just not impressed! I suspect it would be easier to just make a page in Moodle listing half a dozen pages which are directly relevant to the topic than try and get this to work in any reasonable way. I'm afraid it's one of those things where form has completely triumphed over function and that's really not a good thing :-(

[petectid]

I have had similar results to S Rochford, searches take a long time then my popup blocker doesn't allow links to open, images on search results blurred. Echoing S Rochford why not just create a page of links in your VLE for pupils to search through I cannot see this being any more work than saving your searches in this package. This software IMHO would be throwing money away, I can't see any advantage, it is pretty and clever but there are other ways to give this information to pupils without spending. Software designed in this way I find a little annoying, as I know if you were to show it in schools it would sell, it would appeal to those who do not think beyond what they see before them ie; the flashy interface.

[Dos_Box]

Again, you are missing the point as. This is a base, to be built on. What WOULD you like it to do. What WOULD make it better. It's like being negative about buying a base spec car and not asking for all of the upgrades even though you were offered them for free. Use your imagination and think of features. It is all to easy to criticise, this is why Wagumo came to EduGeek to ask for our help. They know they have developed something that could be useful. It's up to us to make it useful. Besides, big long lists of links are not very 21st century are they? Imaging begin able to have one link to a whole mass of relevant videos, sound, images all relevant to the subject being taught, and all managed, sorted and available through one interface?

Again, please start to use your imaginations.

[bottletop]

Ok so I have had a quick play with this search engine.

 

I think that IMHO that the cocept is great I love how it visualises the search in a way that could make the results more accesable to the end user.

 

Once the safe search option is enforced it would be great.

 

I like how that at the top of the screen you can quickly go back to an old search result very quickly as and when needed.

 

However I dont like the way that the search box at the bottom of the screen is too small. this could be at the top of the page instead.

 

In regards to a name for this something along the lines of visearch (pronounced Viz search)

 

just my two pence worth

[Dos_Box]

Thank you, this is just the kind of feedback we need.

[petectid]

big long lists of links are not very 21st century are they?

 

But that is all it returns a big list of not 21st century links, yes maybe they are graphically displayed in either the iPod like cover view they call thumbnails or the list view. While this is a nice idea the graphics would look better and the interface if they were sharper.

 

Again, you are missing the point as. This is a base, to be built on. What WOULD you like it to do.

 

In essence the application is a search engine that queries several sources for information, its slow therefore making it faster would be an improvement, along with a few tweaks of the interface. A preference panel would be good to enable this, so that components could be moved around allowing customization of the interface and the selection of search engines or web services queried. Not really sold on it though it is very clever.

[Crispin]

You know I quite like it.

 

Would it be possible for this to be imbedded into learning platforms, specifically sharepoint, MLG? Would it be possible to 'share' searches etc.. between accounts?

 

I could see it being used in that context, or perhaps by younger students.

 

I would also make it possible to hold the left mouse button and drag left and right on the 'itunes' style results page.

 

Also, making the list view sortable by title, description etc..

Edited June 11, 2009 by Crispin