Google's Custom Search Engine

Next to "stop touching each other," one of the most used phrases in my classroom is "Google it!"  As much as I love Google - and I remember using it before it was a verb - it can be somewhat of a challenging space for students.  With over 100,000,000 gigabytes of information in Google's search index, information overload can be a real thing!  (If you want to learn how Google finds all the websites, check out this video)

Google Custom Search Engine (Google CSE) allows for users to create search engines that only search selected sites.  As a teacher, this is a valuable tool for many different areas of education.

This semester, I am trying something new - each week, students are responsible for completing a current event.  They are asked to find a news article, summarize the article, explain why that article interested them, and tell me how it could be tied to business.  Things went pretty smoothly the first week, but I noticed students were spending a lot of time sifting through search results.

When I heard about Google CSE, I decided that I would create a search engine for my students to use when searching for their current event article.

It is very, very easy to create a custom search engine - in fact, I was able to do it while watching football!  If you're a visual learner, like me, here is a video.  I had the video on one side and snapped my CSE window to the other side and just followed along.

I selected a wide variety of websites, including news and sports, because I let my student pick a news article that interests them.  In addition to websites, you can also search by the top-level domain (.edu, .gov, .com).

 

You can add and remove websites and top-level domains in quickly, as well as customizing the results format and theme.  Another feature that I like is the ability to use speech input.  Speech-to-text is one of the many accommodations that I make for students in my classroom.  Users can also choose to enable image search, too!

This seems like a very valuable tool that teachers (and parents!) can use to make the Internet a more navigable place.  To test my search engine, type your search parameters below: