Harry shares his experiments on searching the web with us. I'm finding material faster and much more efficiently thanks to Harry's suggestions. The basic idea of a meta-search engine seems very attractive. Meta engines do not search their own database of web pages, but instead simultaneously submit the keyword(s) you enter to several different traditional search engines, compile the results from the various engines, and present the results to the user. If it is true that few search engines cover the entire searchable web (not to speak of the potions of the WWW that cannot be accessed by spiders) it seems like a very good strategy to combine the results from several different engines to obtain greater coverage and a correspondingly greater chance of finding the best reference to the topic being searched. In some cases, this approach is actually advantageous, but it is essential to understand that the basic assumption is probably not very accurate today and there are also some fundamental problems with meta-engines.

In the following article Greg shares some of his work with Flash and getting students to interact with the material...The following article was born out of my efforts to prepare an electronic textbook suitable for General Chemistry. The effort to develop an electronic textbook was a response to the growing dissatisfaction of both the faculty and students over the textbooks we, in the department, had been using. We could not find a single textbook that would support all the different teaching styles. The students were relying more and more on classroom lectures and were using the textbooks more for the exercises available at the end of each chapter.