Please help us with this.

[SimpleSi]

Well- its looks nice but I'd like to be able to use the mouse over the images of the web pages instead of having to press on the arrow keys

 

e.g respond to hover rather than having to click

 

regards

 

Simon

Edited June 11, 2009 by SimpleSi

[SYNACK]

• Scroll wheel to skip through results
  
• Search corrolation between multiple searches
  
• Reading age slider to filter langeage based on reading age algorythem
  
• Clicking on plus sign in network view directy expands rather than requireing double click
  
• Grabhand icon when over network background to indicate movable content
  
• Not so much distracting giggiling of the content as it bounces into place
  
• Guided search tems suggested by curriculum data
  

Keywords run against localised curriculum to weight search terms to a particular subject area and provide additional suggestions/filters/keywords to run against search results inline or sugested to user for better results and suggesting better search terms

• Weighted integration - allow results of differnent sources to be weighted seporatly when integrated priorotising internal/known good internal data from sharepoint etc.
  
• Ability to select more than one search circle at a time to be opened
  
• Reposition open button from right hand side to a more integrated location - possibly avalible as a play type button on the search circle or a larger get pages play symbol on the right hand side
  

Personally I don't have an issue with the new window usage for retriving the pages themselves as it makes sence for this kind of thing as you want to corrolate the results of many rather than just one source. This is fine in browsers like firefox as it can be set to open them in new tabs which is better for wide ranging research. I am not aware of a way in code to specify new tab behaviour but this if possible by default would be better.

 

Another possible better option would be to implement an enclosed browser type object inside the silverlight app that opened the sources directly inside the app itself and arranged them inside there. Depending on the coding smarts of the app certain portions of the returned pages could be highlighted as useful and used to refine the search further / provide APA style refferencing of the used portions.

 

In a school situation internal site integration could make this rather good also. Transparent internal auth by being hosted on an internal server (search appliance) with ad integration could allow for collobrative searching inside a class or school group or assisted searching by passing a difficult search off to a teacher for help. With the above inline open and note feature group research could be carried out with each member adding searchterms and resources for a specific aim. The noteing feature would keep both a copy of the searches and the sources but also the source pages at the time (internal server resommended unless they have a rather large data centre). This data/source package could also be handed off to the teacher at completion as proof/part of marking at finding credible sources.

 

Weighted credibility could also be handy but difficult to implement. You could weight based on lists of education providers and major publishers along with lower weightings for blogs / facebook postings. This is not perfect but could be helpful to teach this aspect osmoticly.

 

Rather long post and all just suggestions but hopefully some good ones. As to payment I have no idea, It would need to offer some rather compelling features as search is something that most people are used to getting for free so value added features like the above research mode would help out in that regard. It is difficult to assess how much it would be viable to charge untill the full feature set is known. I know that in the primary schools that I deal with it would be a hard sell currently without some distinct educational benifits.

 

This has prompted me to thing that guided search walkthroughs could eb a good thing for primary schools. A rich graphical journy through searching suggesting ways to make it more realivant or precise and handleing some of the things like language level/trust for the user transparently.

 

A built in theosarus/dictionary to help expand search terms would also seriously benifit students (and teachers/techs ).

 

Reliability wise I have had it refuse to return any results a couple of times on known good results "cat", "pheonix" so that may need to be looked into as well.

 

Overall it looks to have a lot of potential and I hope that they continue to develop it and have an open dialogue with the edugeek community.

[EduTech]

I haven't had much time to play with it today, so thought i would make it one of the things i do this evening.

 

I am finding the system pretty slow at the moment, now weather that is because it is just been throttled by the amount of users that are probably testing it now i dont know.

 

I like the interface, but for staff/students i do think it will take some getting used to as the way you search is very different.

 

I think with it been silverlight based, the options for future development are very wide!! which is fantastic... One of the options i do like is that you would be able to integrate it into Sharepoint very easily! (i'm guessing you would also be able to do it with moodle etc)

 

I do think a scroll function is required using the mouse wheel or something, as it is pretty time consuming clicking the next link recieved in the search.

 

I like how it display's the search results in a spider! i think that is kinda cool..

 

So thats about it for now, i'll try and use this for my searches over the next few days to provide some more feedback.

 

Cheers

 

James.

[PEO]

Will play either tomorrow or over the weekend

[JOrdan01070]

I like it, and think it would help teachers when then have 30 kids searching the internet for info on a subject.

 

The only things i can think of quickly are being able to remove some of the result (categories), the relavance slider grays them out but they can still be selected. Move pages from one category to another just incase, double cliking on the item to open the page, being able to select multiple categories.

 

The only issue i have had was it would not display the page properly sometimes it would be blank or a difffernt page altogther.

Edited June 11, 2009 by JOrdan01070

[User3204]

I don't have Silverlight installed, and I'm not going to go through that palaver on this machine, but anyway, I can still suggest a few things, and hopefully they're not already there.

 

If it allows the use of saved searches, I hope this is something that can only be done by staff, as we don't want students to create a search that finds a load of naughty pictures and then save this for their friends.

If possible for the staff to tweak the results that come out of the search, so that when it is saved, they can only allow relevant results, or conversely, include useless or just plain wrong items in there to make them learn how to search properly.

 

I would also suggest that if it goes off and indexes a local server (SLG/VLE/Intranet etc) then being able to tag the pages to a subject (I don't really know how search engines work in-the-background) so that it can discount searches for French from History subjects (etc).

 

If there are a lot of saved searches, then ideally we would want to be able to categorise them by subjects, relevant to what is taught within the school. And on a per class/year basis (although I don't know how you would restrict or steer the students into the right search "zones"). Every time some company try to sell me some web service I ask them if it is Sshiboleth / AD Integrated, even if I don't know how to do either.

 

Is this something that would be located on-site at the school, in the RBC/LA ISP, or centrally hosted? In which case would you be able to access Intranet sites from outside the school campus or not ( There are advantages to both.) ?

 

 

I know there is a lot information lying around on our internal Common/information drives, would it be able to search this stuff ? Having a decent index of the staff shared drives would be really handy for when we lose track of stuff.

[dwhyte85]

I have to say... I quite like it in terms of look and how it works, tad slow but i'm guessing it's on shared hosting, for a pupil this would be pretty good... but not something i'd like to use long term. I did notice a few rogue results when searching Rugby, nothing illicit just a bit odd... iPod touch!?

 

Anyway, I like it... if/when it's filtered, sped up and tweaked it'll be something I could a child at our school using.

[button_ripple]

• A version for mobile devices/lower-powered devices (PDA's etc...)
  
• Ability to search locations on a local network (e.g. get it to search a shared area), also you will need to put users into groups to stop pupils searching the staff shared area.
  
• Different colours/themes for users to choose from
  
• Option to remove the remember me box, schools using single logins for pupils (e.g. Primary Schools often have class logins), if pupils tell it to remember the password, this could cause problems
  
• Allow users to select the search engines to use
  

Other than that it is a really good search engine - reminds me a bit of Profusion, which allowed users to search about 10 search engines at the same time!!

[mac_shinobi]

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!

 

1. An iPhone app ?

2. Skynet - not sure if there will be any copyright issues on that though - Just dont let it take over your system hehe

[mac_shinobi]

• A version for mobile devices/lower-powered devices (PDA's etc...)
  
• Ability to search locations on a local network (e.g. get it to search a shared area), also you will need to put users into groups to stop pupils searching the staff shared area.
  

Something like spotlight

 

• Different colours/themes for users to choose from ( or just different colours for different types of users ie staff, pupils etc.
  
• Option to remove the remember me box, schools using single logins for pupils (e.g. Primary Schools often have class logins), if pupils tell it to remember the password, this could cause problems
  
• Allow users to select the search engines to use
  

Other than that it is a really good search engine - reminds me a bit of Profusion, which allowed users to search about 10 search engines at the same time!!

 

Also when clicking or double clicking on the pages that come up ( the results ) would be nice of it to open as apposed to just sitting there. Yes I know there is an open link but that requires me to move the mouse again.

[Guest gregory]

I like the idea but..

 

1. way too slooow..

2. can't annotate flash pages..

3. this spider view confuses me..

4. doesn't support screen readers

5. it doesn't do much, does it?