I’ve just revised and updated The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Oolone is a new search engine that shows you large images of search results instead of text. Those kinds of visual results have obvious advantages for English Language Learners.

There are other search engines the provide similar results, including Google if you hover on the text. Because of that, even though I’m adding Oolone to The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners, who knows how long it will be able to survive?

2Lingual is a bilingual search engine. You type in your search term and then choose two languages. Search results will show-up side-by-side in both languages.

It could come in very handy for English Language Learners in content classes, as well as for their teachers who might be looking for materials in a second language that they could offer to their students for extra support. I was quite pleased with the searches I did, though I wish they had separate “tabs” for videos.

They provide bilingual searches for Google and for Bing, plus a voice search capability.

I’m adding it to The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners and to The Best Multilingual & Bilingual Sites For Math, Social Studies, & Science.

Qwiki was the number-one ranked site on The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students — 2010

It’s sort of a multimedia search engine that provides audio support for text, and it’s very engaging.

I recently discovered that not only have they vastly expanded the number of webpages they’ve indexed, but that they also have a daily “round-up” of the day’s news. I’ve now added it to The Best Beginner, Intermediate & Advanced English Language Learner Sites.

Jawoco is a new search engine that could be useful for ELL’s. After you make a query, in addition to the text links, it automatically shows a thumbnail image next to each item. It’s easier for ELL’s to see than in Google, where you have to scroll over each result in order to see a visual preview. Google’s preview is bigger than a thumbnail, of course, but if you scroll over a result in Jawoco, you can also get a much bigger preview.

Of course, the bigger question is if this slight advantage is going to enable Jawoco to make it over the long-term….

As long as it’s around, I’m adding Jawoco to The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners.

Google introduced several new features today, including a voice search for computers. I’ve embedded a short video about it below. If we’re working in the computer lab, and students have microphones on already, I could see it as an easy opportunity for pronunciation practice:

Askives is a new search engine that utilizes many of the question/answer sites that abound on the Web. Like another similar site, Kngine, though, it appears to be able to separate the good answers from the many useless and inaccurate ones that are out there.

I’m adding it to The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners.

Qwiki, the number-one ranked site on The Best Websites For English Language Learner Students — 2010, opened to the public today (you might want to check out TechCrunch’s post — Video Search Engine Qwiki Is Now Available To The Public).

Here is how I described Qwiki on the “The Best…” list:

I first read about Qwiki in Newsweek. Qwiki is described very accurately by TechCrunch:

Qwiki is somewhere in between a visual search engine and a highly interactive and entertaining Wikipedia. It assembles information on the fly for millions of topics, bringing together images and text in a truly magical way.

One thing that TechCrunch didn’t mention, and I learned when I snagged an invite, was that the text is not only very accessible, audio support for it is provided, too. Even though it’s not open to the public yet (but will be soon), I’m adding it to The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners and making it number one on this list. Students are going to love it.

I first read about Qwiki last week in Newsweek. Then, today, TechCrunch announced that they had a limited number of invites to check it out. The probably don’t have any left by now, but I’d strongly encourage you to go there and try, because Qwiki is definitely worth a visit.

Qwiki is described very accurately by TechCrunch:

Qwiki is somewhere in between a visual search engine and a highly interactive and entertaining Wikipedia. It assembles information on the fly for millions of topics, bringing together images and text in a truly magical way.

One thing that TechCrunch didn’t mention, and I learned when I snagged an invite, was that the text is not only very accessible, audio support for it is provided, too.

Even though it’s not open to the public yet, I’m adding it to The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners. Students are going to love it.

Earlier today, I shared a new application that the Middlespot Search Engine folks have developed to easily create online books and reports (see “Simple Booklet” Is A New Tool Many Teachers Will Want To Use).

Just now, they shared with me a new beta version of their search engine, which is even better than their present one (which is ranked number one on The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners).

Their new version is like an even easier and embeddable Wallwisher. In other words, it’s a virtual bulletin board with virtual “stickies.”

If you’re searching for an image, website, or video, though, you don’t necessarily have to copy and paste their url addresses (though you can) — if they are in the search results you just click on it to go into your “mashup” and it goes to it automatically. No registration is necessary, and you can collaborate with others.

The new version makes it even more useful for higher level thinking skills like categorization. I describe how to use applications like Middlespot for this purpose in The Best Social Bookmarking Applications For English Language Learners & Other Students.

Remember, though, it’s still in “beta,” so it may have a few bugs….