September 08, 2006
Using iframes in a Tab Widget to Support Web Page Comparison
A couple of things I'm keen to hammer home in an early section of Beyond Google are: a) that Google is not the only general purpose search engine out there; and b) that the different, major league search engines may return differently ranked results for identical queries made at the same time.
To try and encourage students to compare search queries across search engines, I have been exploring various ways in which we might used tabbed widgets to embed search pages within a teaching page.
I have popped up several demos at Multisearch panels demo, including examples of applying the same, predefined search to several search engines via a single link, and allowing the user to apply a single search box query to several search engines at the same time.
I've also doodled a couple of standalone pages: GYM Comparison and Google Scholar and Windows Live Academic.
An alternative GYM comparison page additionally allows you to a pass a search query directly in to the page, as for example this multiSearch on tabbed browsing.
One thing I did briefly consider was using AJAX search APIs to pull the results from the different search engines directly into the page.
However, because we want the students to know the results really are coming back from the specified search engines, embedding the real SERPs in an iframe makes this abundantly clear. As far as copyright issues relating to embedding one page in another goes, I would say this is a fair use - no claim other than that the embedded pages are the actual ones are made, and the pages are being embedded to support a comparison being made in an educational context.
We're still working out the best way - if at all - of integrating these sorts of interactive exercise within the course materials, so if anyone has any comments - or has tried something similar in the past - please get in touch...
PS Partly in response to this article on "A great feature in AltaVista, alltheweb, and Ask.com, but not in Google", which describes limit searching by date on the Altavista, AllTheWeb and Ask - but not Google - advanced search pages, I felt I ought to knock up an advanced search page tabbed display.
I wonder too whether I really should add a few more search engines to the basic search engine display panel?
PS I just came across GahooYoogle which allows you to search Google and Yahoo (web search, image search etc) side by side in a spilt panel view.
Posted by ajh59 at September 8, 2006 05:40 PM