Educational Internet Searches to be Made Easier and More Efficient

A new partnership was recently announced between the Association of Educational Publishers and Creative Commons to help devise an easier and more efficient search method for students to find educational research material on the World Wide Web.

The goal of the group is not to usurp giant search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, but to create a better educational interface for those search engines. Online students are more likely to face issues with search engines as the majority of their work is dependent on finding good educational research material. The group hopes to create detailed educational search criteria that interfaces with the existing search engines that will give students more relevant hits. Since search engines weren’t designed with students in mind, their searches don’t always result in correct or relevant information that is easily found, which can lead to mistakes on important research for term papers.

The group hopes to develop a whole new framework
According to Charlene Gaynor, the CEO of AEP, the group hopes to come up with some kind of “framework” that narrows educational search content and weeds out irrelevant search data. The irrelevant search data is often what makes weeding through searches so frustrating. Additionally, the group also hopes to encourage educational publishing groups to institute metatags that correspond to their content, whether it is open source information or proprietary.

The endeavor, which is funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation, has no guarantee of success. None of the major search engines have agreed formally to institute or to incorporate any new framework, but they have indicated that they “invite participation from major consumers and producers of structured data on the Web,” according to a statement issued by the three major search engines’ joint Schema project.

A more social endeavor
The CEO of Creative Commons, Catherine Casserly, says that the project’s long-term goal is to move far “beyond vocabulary and metadata,” and into more of a shared informational community of users. In that way, providers and students can learn what resources and information other users have found to be “particularly useful.”

As far as students are concerned, a more social experience may mean a better experience. The days of lone research in the library may soon be morphing into a shared informational exchange, with targeted information regarding specific educational information more easily found than it is now.