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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.
To be fair, your feeling of superiority is mainly because you're a teenager.
After all, "Bob" was a great success.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Later I wrongly presumed my niece, who was a sharp book-reading kid of the mouse generation, would become the 'IT support staff' of her home & I could stop handling that. Didn't work out that way. Despite daily use, she's a decidedly non-technical average user. I've remained the 'tech' guy for family and friends, more than half of which grew up with the mouse now.
Smart kid to avoid getting stuck in a tech support role. Kudos to her.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
"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.