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The need for "Research Quality" search engines
Opportunities for improvement -- Serving students
This page attempts to get at the needs of students and at the usefulness of search tools to students. If you are a student, you are invited to offer your opinions and comments at the bottom of this page.
Low cost
At the university level, "full ride" scholarships / bursaries / parents / rich uncles may cover tuition, but rarely are book allowances realistic. With the advent of Internet-based competition for college bookstores, students increasingly shop the net for textbooks, even at the cost of prolonged delays. [Ed: The logic of jeopardizing performance in a course costing $1600 in order to save $40 on a textbook may escape you.] The point: Students are resistant to high prices in learning support materials.
The student market might be well served by desktop search engines as well as Internet search engines that are priced at zero. (Okay, Internet searches usually are not really free; there is the cost of being exposed to ads.) The free tools concept has been well established by the Adobe Acrobat reader, Internet Explorer, etc. The reader together with indexes shared by others may be enough for many students, particularly when they are first exposed to search-based student support tools. Free use would be further enhanced to the extent that Internet sites that offer search are willing to provide search results in the form of mini-indexes.
Preparation tools such as text extractors, formatters, web crawlers, and indexing engines might be packaged together and made available under low cost semester-long rental arrangements.
Time pressure
Students tend to feel time pressure keenly, particularly as the semester moves past the half-way point. [Ed: Five years after graduation, they look back and laugh if you suggest that pressure was higher in student days.] Students don't read manuals. Their sense of urgency makes simplicity and user-friendliness very important in software.
Pre-indexed course materials
Text book publishers are more and more making content related to a course available in electronic form. If that material were pre-indexed, both publishers and students would win. If copyright were guarded well enough, some less risk-averse publishers may even go the distance of pre-indexing the text itself. In this case, a search engine that handles graphics would have an edge. If the desktop search engine has a browser type interface, it is technologically rather easy to incorporate the graphics, maps, photos, etc. that are expected in textbooks into the indexed (readable and fully searchable) version.
"Helps for tired students:" Where students are, will note providers be far behind? Retired professors, fellow students, even publishers get into this game. If the notes are indexed, so much the better. If the system allows for integration or searching across multiple indexes (everything related to a course), so much the better. Under this arrangement, the student can enter a few words related to a concept, and get a quick overview. This is an aid to preparation for a class, writing an essay, or cramming for a test.
Classical content that is out of copyright might very readily be made available at very low cost to students as pre-indexed material. If Silas Marner is on the syllabus, it is easy to guess a student's choice when confronted with $15 for the hard copy and 50 cents for the indexed electronic version (which is readable and fully searchable on the student's computer).
Collaboration and sharing
Students invented sharing (almost) when it comes to music. Why not do the same with indexes?
More to the point, students can work together on assignments, each locating relevant material, pooling it, getting one of the group members to index it, re-issue it. This could be done repeatedly, with a new release sent out to group members even hourly if the situation calls for it. Collaborative learning is encouraged in many schools. Here is an interesting way to implement it.
Note that the kind of collaboration described here works only if the indexing tools are in the hands of the students, not if indexing power is centralized and tucked away in an Internet search engine firm's server farm.
Text extraction software
Text extraction software has an interesting application in student life. Files that come to the student may be in a format for which the student does not have the software. Text extraction software plus indexing may get around the need to buy various alternative software programs.
Students as writers
Everything on the writer's page applies equally to students, since written assignments are an inevitable part of student life. To write a major thesis, a student would be well served by effective data collection, indexing, and search tools.
Your feedback
If you are a student or an educator, your comments on this page would be welcomed.
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