Looking for Early Years Information? You need EYES!

One of the most frustrating things about doing a Google search is the amount of irrelevant or non-academic material which appears in your results. So today's post is about a service I'm trialling that tries to get around this problem by building a search engine which focuses only on relevant and suitable webpages, which I've named EYES (because it stands for 'Early Years, Education and Social policy', and also because it looks for things).

You can access EYES by clicking on this link. You will then be looking at a simple search box, which is powered by Google software; the difference is that this search engine will only find results from the websites which it has been programmed to look through. I've selected about 50 websites dealing with all aspects of childcare, early years, and social policy, which have been chosen for the quality and reliability of the information that they provide - more sites will be added shortly.

It's important to emphasise that this is only a trial for now - this new search engine is very much in the beta stage. Shortly it should be possible to embed the search box into this blog, although I'd like to iron out any teething problems before doing that. What would be really helpful for now would be for anyone who tries the service to give some feedback, whether good or bad, on how useful they found it. Suggestions on possible improvements that you would like to see will also be gratefully received. You can contact me either by leaving a comment below or by emailing me at D.Renfree@ucb.ac.uk