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

webbrowser Homepage sites should offer search

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice if Slashdot had a re-direct and webservice to allow it to cascade search queries onto peers for a search of user's shared data. It would make it interesting if such competing organizations would allow such a service in search technology that not even Google could catalogue. This would be like a known proprietary-access SAMBA or FTP share.

But who do you believe, an Anonymous Coward like me or CIA's bandwidth-sucking Google bot leeching of common phone-book and library knowledge without anyone's permition? Google should be ashamed. Bring transparently torrent'd FTP shares into play, perhaps with an intelligent WIFI Hub protocol so complementing a WIFI Hub can pass a courier as would a repeater to solicit or notify roaming terminals of requests all through leapfrogging through nearby Hubs in such gateway mode.