I am currently in the midst of (but nearing the end), of my World History course. You would obviously assume that World History consists of a boatload of reading – it does, because after all, summarizing the history of human civilization isn’t a small novel-worth of information. (My point – my textbook has 1044 pages.)
My teacher has an affinity for reading student essays. The course has a grand total of forty (with a 500+ word requirement for each) essays. Not that a normal school wouldn’t have writing assignments… but forty? My school, if I haven’t mentioned it before, is an online high school. Because of the structure of distance-education, writing is critical in determining how much a student has learned. (My point – it’s necessary. At least I’m fairly proficient at writing.)
The issue that has dogged me throughout this course is finding sources for varied papers. My teacher also has an affection against a hatred for Wikipedia – the one place where information is gathered together in a nice, orderly, categorized way. (My OCD likes order. I, personally, OCD aside, am a very spontaneous person. The two don’t mix well.) I learned quickly that you could go to the Wikipedia article and find the sources from the said article that contained the information you needed. However, the past couple of essays have collectively been a long search for information. Is it bad when you spend more time researching than actually writing the essay?
Yesterday, while looking for elusive articles about civilian conditions before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I discovered an amazing search engine! It’s called Sweet Search.
SweetSearch is a Search Engine for Students.
It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content onfindingDulcinea. We constantly evaluate our search results and “fine-tune” them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and university Web sites.
SweetSearch helps students find outstanding information, faster. It enables them to determine the most relevant results from a list of credible resources, and makes it much easier for them to find primary sources. We exclude not only the spam sites that many students could spot, but also the marginal sites that read well and authoritatively, but lack academic or journalistic rigor. As importantly, the very best Web sites that appear on the first page of SweetSearch results are often buried on other search engines.
Does that sound like a winner, or what? Within a half-an-hour, I was ready to type my essay, wondering why I’d wasted a half a day searching with Google and EBSCOhost. (Sorry Google. I still love you – just not for research anymore.)
Why didn’t I discover this before? If I had known about Sweet Search at the beginning of World History, I think I would have saved myself hundreds of hours of research.
If you’re a student who has to write and research a lot (*raises hand*), then I would definitely suggest trying Sweet Search. I found this, and knew that I had to share it… 🙂
Now, I’m off to work on a blog design.
http://www.sweetsearch.com/docroot/dulcinea/jsp/widget.jsp?type=small
P.S. I am in no way being compensated for this post. Sweet Search doesn’t even know who I am… I’m just recommending their product because of how useful it was to me… 😉
Farmgirl Writes 
Wow, that sounds awesome! I'm sure I'll get to use it for History next semester. =) (my school has blocked scheduling so I only have a subject for one semester)
Thanks so much for sharing, Amanda!
The name goes well with your sweet tooth.
Awesome! I'll have to try that. 🙂
I know W History (especially honors) has lots of writing. They're all really long… But what the teacher cares about most is not the writing or style, but the content. But I agree — the research was the worst! My mom usually helped me, but even between the two of us, it usually took an hour to find sources and outline my paper….
Sweet! (haha… sorry) I hadn't heard of that before, but will definitely use it in the future. Thanks so much for sharing!
~Elizabeth~
Amanda, Sweet Search knows who you are now – and we are impressed. Thank you for this kind review; with your permission, we'd like to feature it on our Web site. We're thrilled you find Sweet Search so helpful, and we appreciate your helping us spread the word about it. You are fortunate to have a teacher who requires you to write so much – not because it helps show what you've learned, but because it makes you a better writer – practice makes perfect. And no, it's not bad when research takes more time than writing – I tell my writers, when they write for our sister site, findingDulcinea, that I want them to spend 80% of their time thinking about and researching their topic, and 20% of the time writing. When I write, it's actually often 90/10 – when you found outstanding research, the paper practically writes itself. Have you checked out the Yolink tool bar in the upper right hand corner? It enables you to save your research to a Google doc or a social media platform.
I would encourage you and your classmates to enter our On This Day contest: http://findingeducation.com/on-this-day-challenge…
We look forward to reading more of your work.
Sincerely,
Mark E. Moran
Founder & CEO
Dulcinea Media, Inc. <a href="http://www.FindingDulcinea.com” target=”_blank”> <a href="http://www.FindingDulcinea.com” target=”_blank”>www.FindingDulcinea.com <a href="http://www.SweetSearch.com” target=”_blank”> <a href="http://www.SweetSearch.com” target=”_blank”>www.SweetSearch.com
Very funny, Mom… *cough*
Love the pun! 😛
Hey Amanda, seeing you're reflecting on the vagaries of search you might like to have a look at a Google site I've created to assist teachers with search and teaching search. You can find it at https://sites.google.com/site/mrpbps01/ Like you I'm a fan of SweetSearch and Mark's Finding Dulcinea. Good luck with your assignment.
John P http://johnp.wordpress.com
Hey! Wow, you're zooming ahead of me in W.H. :O But thanks for the great resource! 😀
Hey thanks! This is really helpful, especially since I'm having the same problem with finding good resources, and I'm writing that first research paper rough draft=/ I mean, you'd think its easy to get a whole lot of info on Rome and China for a comparison, right? I wish. Hopefully this site will help. I just tried it real quick and found a lot of stuff I could use though!
God bless!
-Ray