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Surching with Surchur
Surchur calls itself the dashboard to right now, or what is hot on the Web. And I right now added it to my students’ searching toolkit as well as their real-time search page (for Twitter). This five-minute video explains Surchur’s features:
It seems that we have so many new types of search tools to share with learners this coming school year. This one will find a place on my pathfinders for Global Studies and a number of other current event-based courses.
Surchur scans dynamic content–blogs, pictures, videos, news, social web entries, and products. Users can search across these formats in an all search or search the formats individually. A search meter discerns a topic’s current hotness, whether it’s simply hot or catching fire.
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It is not your traditional all-purpose search that (when we are lucky) finds treasured, lengthy, analytical documents.
Surchur functions as a solid current awareness tool, highlighting the buzz relating to breaking events and people in the news. For instance, today Surchur will do a great job on Brett Favre and Hurricane Bill. But, on Andrew Jackson or the Potato Famine? Not so much.
It answers questions:
- What’s happening?
- What are people seeing?
- What are they thinking and saying about it?
- How many people are talking?
- Where are they talking?
How does it work?
We aggregate the keywords from Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, Bing xRank, Twitter trending topics, Technorati popular, CNN Popular topics and more and then rank them by combined criteria of blog mentions, twitter mentions and searches on Surchur. At a glance you can see what is popular and why.
One neat feature is the ability to bookmark your surches.
Bookmark a specific URL on Surchur.com such as http://surchur.com/all/panda+bears and you’ll find that everytime you visit there’s the latest and greatest information on the topic waiting for you to browse. Come back tomorrow and the page will be entirely different with new information and media.
The site’s FAQs page notes that Surchur attempts to filter adult content, gambling, and cursing.
I asked marketing director, Monika Lorincz what Surchur offers us in the K12 arena:
We live in an era of technology and information, therefore it is crucial to be aware of what is happening right now all over the world and one way to do so is through real-time search and discovery. Knowing what is at the forefront of news right now can be a great conversation starter in classrooms everywhere
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About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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