3 Technology Tips to Make College Search Easier
March 15th, 2008Finding that perfect college can be a drag, but with the clever use of technology you can save time and frustration.
1 – Google Domain Restriction Queries:
If you are doing a search and only want to pull up lists of colleges you can actually restrict your search to weed out other types of websites. The way this is done is with Google’s site: operator. For instance, if I want to pull up schools offering MBA Programs I would use the following query:
“site:.edu mba programs”
This query produces these results. This is a pretty clean set of results and can make your search much easier.
You can also use this restrictive parameter to search within a site that you like. Let’s say you want to search only US College Search for “
“site:uscollegesearch.org
This query would yield these results.
2 – Use an RSS Aggregator to Collect Feeds
Blogs are no longer just an interesting new technology, they are a necessity. Today, most major web sites have blogs on them. They are nice, but to take advantage of this new technology you need an RSS Aggregator. These tools keep you from having to keep going back to blogs to check on updates. When the blog updates, your RSS Aggregator updates as well. Some popular aggregators are:
How do they work? You just need to set up an account, and then when you are on a blog you will see words like “RSS” or Feed.” You might also see an orange RSS symbol (square with white stripes).
Click on these links and you will be able to add that blogs feed to your feed reader. Once you have some feeds added you can go into your reader and it will show you all the latest headlines from your favorite blogs. This makes consuming blog content much easier. Now, when you find a site that has a blog you like, just add it to your reader. These may be school blogs, or just blogs about education search in general. It’s a huge time saver.
3 – Use Social Sites to Research Lesser Known Schools
Social sites like Yahoo Answers can weed out the polished PR speak many schools feed to the masses. The use of social sites can give you the low down on less known schools that are more difficult to research.
These social sites can also be a great way to fine tune your search by finding out more specific information. Maybe you know about a school, but need more information about a specific program and the quality of the faculty. Some great social sites to help you with your research are:
A great tip for Yahoo Answers is to use their RSS features. If search for questions about “business colleges,” there will be an option to grab the RSS feed for this query. Then, any new questions about business colleges from other users will be piped into your RSS Feed Reader.
Another great way to use social sites is to find people that went to a school you are looking at. Sites like MySpace and Facebook have tons of information on who went where. Do a few searches on these sites to find people who have been through the program and shoot them a message.
