Google offers a custom search tool called Google Co-op that is incredibly useful for teachers. Essentially, you create your own search engine by selecting the sites that Google will index. It searches only the sites I specify, bypassing a lot of the junk.

Why is this useful? I’ve accumulated 400+ bookmarks related to the material I teach, and I add more all the time. Even though I use del.icio.us to save and organize all my bookmarks, it can still take a long time to find what I’m looking for. Now I use my custom Google search engine to search through all the sites, instead of sorting them. It saves a lot of time.

My custom Google search engine has more advantages. There are several sites that I like but are very large and very time consuming to navigate through. Sites such as PBS.org, free.ed.gov, and the History News Network have an enormous amount of great material, but it can take a long time to find what you’re looking for. Now I can quickly search all of them for relevant content in a fraction of the time.

The same thing applies to all those sites that specialize in lesson plans. Most of their stuff isn’t very good and the sites themselves are slow to navigate through. It takes forever to find anything worthwhile on those sites. It’s much faster just to search though them, and search all of them at once.

I’ve created the custom Google search engine for myself, but I’m posting it on my blog so that I can share it with my fellow teachers. Please use it for yourself and share with the community any good websites that you know. My hope is that this can become a teaching tool used and maintained by a community of teachers, not just myself. You can post websites in the comments or send me an email. If anyone is willing, I can give you direct access to add sites to the index. All you need is a Google account.

The search box for me custom search engine is below. If you’re reading this using a RSS reader (more about those in another post), you’ll need to follow the link to nategrondin.com because RSS readers don’t support javascript.

The search engine can also be found permanently here.