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Simplifying Search For a Younger Audience
An article in the NY Times discusses how kids interact with search engines, which are primarily designed for adult users who are familiar with basic internet concepts. From the article:
"When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools. ... Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, said that for certain types of tasks, like finding a list of American presidents, people found answers 28 percent faster with a search of images rather than of text. He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. ... Children also tend to want to ask questions like 'Who is the president?' rather than type in a keyword. Scott Kim, chief technology officer at Ask.com, said that because as many as a third of search queries were entered as questions (up to 43 percent on Ask Kids, a variant designed for children), it had enlarged search boxes on both sites by almost 30 percent."
I recommend they use google, then.
Wolfram Alpha seems to be a good step in this very direction.
My son types whatever he wants into google. He doesn't know how to type URLs. My wife and her sister are the same. If home didn't go to a search engine they would be lost. If home didn't go to google they would search for google first.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Seriously, this reads more like the 'Mikey likes it!' life cereal commercial than research.
This must explain why google has such a slim market share
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Now look, the moment new tech comes onto the field, it's usually kids or other youths who, after somehow obtaining it, are the ones most comfortable with it.
You don't hear a lot of stories about kids going "Well this newfangled contraption is far too complicated. No sirree, back to the cosmombulating gizmotron 3000 which has worked for me for the last 30 years."
You don't need to make a "kiddy" version of the search engine. Children will learn to use the adult tools easily and will be prepared for the future. If we force them to use dumbed down versions, eventually dumbed down versions will be the norm since the next generation will be against changing it.
And stop dumbing everything down. It used to be that entering a couple of words into a search engine gave a somewhat predictable result. Now every search engine keeps second-guessing me. "Did you mean...? We've already included the suggested results." No, if I had meant that, then I would have typed it. Some words have become almost unsearchable because search engines keep "generalizing" them to words so generic that they hardly filter anything anymore (which happens easily considering there are more languages than English and similar looking words can mean very different things). Until computers become sentient and can actually "do what I mean", I want them to do what I tell them to do, got it?
The idea that most adult users are "familiar with basic internet concepts" made me chuckle. If anything, I'd expect a kid to figure out how to use a search engine effectively (rephrase search terms; skip results that are obviously spammish SEO garbage) a lot faster than a typical adult.
Filtering the explicit material from search result is one thing, but can any search engine be simpler than what we already have in Google or Bing? Adult content are already filtered by default and they're already simple enough that even my 5-year old nephew can use them with no fuss. Perhaps what the people want is a schoolkid version of the existing search engines that will assist the kids in their homework right out of the box?
Funny, this is the opposite reasoning as to why I started using Google over yahoo/excite/altavista.
All the other search providers started cluttering their pages up. Google was simple and clean and did what I wanted.
After all, "Bob" was a great success.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
With apologies, but the wisdom of TRON seems so appropriate right about now.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I don't think their search boxes not being big enough is the main improvement they need to work on. How about improving search results by 30% instead?
And they've been doing this for a while too. In an interview last year, their exec mainly droned on about Ask3D, one of their many hare-brained attempts to make an "Ask X", where X is some stupid representation of results for gimmicky or audience-targeting purposes.
In some ways, it's not totally stupid from a business point of view. Google has pretty good results (though the web's increasing noisiness and the arms race with SEO is making them maybe worse than they once were), and it's hard to beat them at that game. So competitors are inevitably trying to find other angles on which to compete, like trying to come up with results presentation that's snazzier than Google's list of links (though Google's list of links is getting more complicated in graphically subtle but quite useful ways), or special versions like "Ask Kids" to try to convince niche audiences that they need something special for them rather than a general-purpose search engine. But I'm not really convinced there's anything to these attempts.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hey, I used to be the kid that learned everything by himself and taught my parents how computers and programs work.
Microsoft, the nanny company?
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
It should be strait-forward, remove all .COM entries to separate the queries by where the server is located.
If I wanted Google, there's nothing that should keep from http://google./ The same is for GMail. You see, ICANN wants every country to participate in the international naming scheme and get money for squabbles between their fee-dom of selling the 3-digit registry, when it's absolutely ludicrous that your DNS requests should even leave the tier of your ISP.
Of'course the whole setup is to favor commerce rather than network proficiency. That's why the Internet is a giant joke for politicians to make-believe they can regulate, and is why every website is an administrative failure because of the pseudo-politics involved in the dellusion of its regulation.
Or simplifying advertising and targeting results?
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I have two boys (age 2 and 4) and, by simply observing the way they learn, I can easily spot logical flaws in software or UI in general :-) For example, they tend to mix Google Earth and Network Connection panel on Win as they both use Earth-like _icon_. They can't find things on Win7 because UI and _icons changed_ (their first OS was XP). Furthermore, they manage to run application from Win Explorer by it's _order_ - not it's name since they can't read and English is not their native language anyways. They adopted multitouch UI last year in a _day_ (moving, resizing, running things) which tells more than tonns of studies. Younger boy adopts things faster because older one already "dumbs things down" to the level they can both understand.
I tried to simply search for a younger audience, now I think I'm on some FBI watch list.
This technology was demonstrated of all places the same Christmas Island where Goatse was originally hosted (and thereafter terminated). This guy has technology that technology that filters inappropriate results, but I'm more concerned with his affiliation with former and ex Nazi party members back in World War 2. I just get the feeling that just because he's a good speaker, a community organizer, progressive, some prior relationships with minority political views, things can't possibly get worse... (read: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Polpot, Bush-en Sr. & Jr., and now Barack H. Obama.
Now every search engine keeps second-guessing me. "Did you mean...?
Yeah, it's great. I can type any old s**t into Google and it knows exactly what I mean!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Children are much more open to new ideas and learn much faster than adults. Why the hell would they need a simplified interface? Senior citizens are the ones in need of simplified interfaces.
Why isn't there a preference setting for this though? The second guessing of spelling I don't mind, at least the real results still show up ... but leaving out search terms silently is just insane.
but leaving out search terms silently is just insane
If you're referring to "stop words" ("the", "of", etc.), while Google used to leave those out unless you gave just the right directions to include them Google no longer does that as of early last year.
http://www.seofaststart.com/blog/stop-words-are-dead explains that Google (and what was then MSN, presumably Bing followed in MSN's footsteps on this) are now (mostly) paying attention to "stop words".
There's been some speculation that the change may have been a results of Google implementing this http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=7,319,994.PN.&OS=pn/7,319,994&RS=PN/7,319,994 patented document compression scheme.
(NO, I don't fiddle around with Search Engine Optimization. I am working to setup a search engine for a government organization so "well, how would that search behave in Google" is often a helpful point of comparison)
"He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. ..."
translation:
bing is for children who have not yet leant how to set the default search engine to google.
Kids who can type "who is the president?" (implied: "...of the US") into a search engine and get a result back probably already know the answer.
My son types whatever he wants into google. He doesn't know how to type URLs. My wife and her sister are the same. If home didn't go to a search engine they would be lost. If home didn't go to google they would search for google first.
But if they do not know how to type URLs, as you just stated, then how would they search for Google to search whatever it was they wanted to search for in the first place? You failed logic, please hand in your membership card.
is a widow in her 70s...i'd put linux on her old pc so she could continue to use it after it became too slow (ie: win98 was bogged down with malware)-: but her grown kids got her a new windoze laptop (fuckin' microserfs)-:
so the other day she called me, saying windoze had just updated itself, and now she can't get on webmail or anything...
i click on her shortcuts, and a firefox window opens(i've @ least got her away from internet exploder;-) but it's too smal to show anything, maybe 1"x1", not even any controls...it was no problem to grab the l/r corner & expand it, but she was totally flummoxed by it:-(
to paraphrase my dad: no one's ever gone broke underestimating to capabilities of the average microserf;-}
There are people that actually use Bing. Whodathunkit?
On the other hand, it can be a pain if it's done wrong.
Over the last year, Google's spelling correction has steadily become more aggressive. At first, Google just suggested "Did you mean X?", but gave you the results for what you'd specified. Then they started displaying "Did you mean X", and gave you the results for X. Then they just gave you the results after spelling correction and don't even tell you they did. Recently, they've backed that off a little, and now intermix results from the original query and the spelling-corrected form.
If you want literal search with Google, quote the words being searched.
Anyone remember Yahooligans?
The question mentioned in the article: Which day would the vice president’s birthday fall on the next year?
This seemed like a perfectly reasonable question for the self-proclaimed "computational knowledge engine". Sadly it fails as well.
So I'll elaborate, that DNS to me should be handled how AOL and Compuserve provided their network service. Much of the Internet is nothing more than a scam of commerce. The only way for recognition is to agree to the trade and legal stipulations that ICANN pushes. Much of the routing is to a style only approved by ICANN. The People's Republic of China wants to happen what I'm discussing, but they are just as cruel as ICANN; more to facilitate commerce by their predirection of political slant, no different than how the DMCA, RIAA, FBI, CIA, NBAACP, and whomever else want the Internet catalogued in commercial registries rather than a form and style of communications. The regulation is bi-passing the function of networks to regulate the very servers even if they're not using the network.
The Pirate Bay is being hit by the same manner. What we need is the Internet to behave like a proxy CB Radio to hosts can pass information on behalf of eachother (tor) without getting screened for religious and political reasons of anti-speach. So that's why now there is the reserve for jurisdiction to thrive in an administrative capacity of consent through the many facets of ICANN's registration scheme of adding their postfix qualifier characters (read .net, .com, .edu, .name, etc) upon a domain name. It's all a scam to carry jurisdiction and rule other than what is decided by those administry over the services. ICANN in this regard is in-fact a host peer for it's DNS service allocation, in direct competition with GNUTELLA and KAZZAA and Torrent trafick; ICANN is actively and indiscriminately invading with violence other networks that it has no jurisdiction over.
Imagine sending HTTP and FTP requests through a torrent scheme of peers that all have a presence and preference: unreachable by foreing legal claims, and impossible to be traced. hmmmmm, like 4chan and a Proxy wrapped into one without being banned.
Interesting. I just did a Google search for president of Europe. The first three answers are correct.