I’m a committed Google search user. I like Google’s easy interface, it’s intuitive shortcuts, and it’s uncannily accurate search results. Other general search engines just don’t seem to measure up.<\/p>\n

However, Google and it’s lesser counterparts search the entire web–or at least as much of the web as can be indexed on a regular basis. That’s a lot of information to sift through. Sometimes it’s more effective to search a subset of the web with a tool that is targeted toward the specific results you want. Google Scholar<\/a> is a good example–it searches only journals, peer-reviewed papers, theses, abstracts, and related academic topics. Another example, cited elsewhere on this blog, is Everyzing<\/a>, a search engine that uses advanced algorithms to search for online videos by content and not just titles or text descriptions.<\/p>\n

That’s why I was (initially) very excited to find TuToogle<\/a>, a search engine that claims to index over 100,000 online tutorials on a variety of subjects. The site’s goal is an admirable one–a one-stop portal for finding out how to do things. A quick check of the site’s search capabilities was promising–it  quickly found tutorials for PowerPoint, Excel, AutoCad, and a few others that I tried.<\/p>\n

Disappointment began to set in when I searched for tutorials for Inspiration, an outlining, brainstorming, and concept-mapping tool that I use in my classes. TuToogle found nothing at all other than a couple of unrelated PhotoShop tutorials. Searching Google with “inspiration tutorial” immediately returned dozens of relevant sites. Further, TuToogle’s on-screen display of returned hits is dismal. TuToogle provides meager descriptions of the site along with the site’s title, and the hits are randomly mixed in with ads from Google. There does not seem to be any kind of prioritization of hits, either–another area in which Google excels. And–unforgivable for a new search tool–some of the hits were dead links.<\/p>\n

TuToogle is–at least at present–a very disappointing iteration of a potentially very useful tool. For now, use Google.<\/p>\n

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I’m a committed Google search user. I like Google’s easy interface, it’s intuitive shortcuts, and it’s uncannily accurate search results. Other general search engines just don’t seem to measure up. However, Google and it’s lesser counterparts search the entire web–or at least as much of the web as can be indexed on a regular basis. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}