Alt Search Engines today wrote about a neat site called Middlespot. It’s sort of a combination Search Engine and a little bit of a social bookmarking application.

After you enter your search term and click “enter,” your search results appear both as images and short text blurbs. Obviously, showing these screenshots benefit English Language Learners, and several other search engines I’ve listed on my website under Search Engines have this feature.

The unique tool offered by Middlespot is called a “workpad.” You can drag-and-drop the webpages you want onto your workpad, give it a title, and then Middlespot will give your workpad its own url that you can post on a blog or online journal, or email to someone else.

Anything that can easily help develop higher-order thinking skills like categorization is an asset. English Language Learners can use Middlespot to identify their favorite activities for learning vocabulary, reading, science, etc.; post the link on their own blog or online journal, and then explain why they chose them.    That’s just one example.

It would be great if the site could expand to searching for images, and also allow users to write descriptions in each workpad in addition to naming the entire category.  I’ve written to them asking if these features are on the “drawing-board.”