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."

Comments

Kids aren't stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Kids aren't stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_fixedness

The older you get the more often you look at things based on previous experience. This can be useful sometimes, but other times it can cause you to have difficulty grokking new tech.

Imagine if someone redesigned an interface in a completely different manner. How confused would we be if to "press" a button you had to waggle your left eyebrow at a rate of 2 waggles a second? Why hello Rainbow's End how are you doing?

I caught on fast in 1978, but very few of my contemporaries did. 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.

This may be due to specialization of labor. You know how to do the computer stuff so none of the others cared to learn it. Maybe one of them can bake awesome cupcakes which you yourself cannot.

Also, let's not forget that in 1978 computers were relatively new, and people with it were far more likely to study how it works. Look at cars. Back before or during the Model T era most people who owned an automobile would be hobbyists who'd work out all the kinks. As the automobile became more prevalent, now we've got people who can just figure out how to pump gas.

Hell, I barely understand how a light bulb works and those things are everywhere.

Stop thinking of the children!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

clunky interfaces

[seeker_1us]

He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children.

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.

A better search

[MrKaos]

Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop.

- Dr. Walter Gibbs

With apologies, but the wisdom of TRON seems so appropriate right about now.

Re:Google

[beelsebob]

I was going to say... How can you be 28% faster with an image search, when you type "list of am" into google, it predicts you want american presidents, and then comes up with wikipedia's list as it's first result... That seems pretty hard to beat.

Simplifying searching?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Or simplifying advertising and targeting results?

Re:Google

[h4rm0ny]

Image search is probably not the best way to learn who the president of a country is. Wolfram Alpha seems the best approach to this sort of thing:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+is+the+president+of+the+USA