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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?
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.
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.
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.
OK, I'll bite. Why is it ludicrous for DNS requests to go outside the tier of your ISP? Why did you bother to specify the tier, as opposed to you saying, for example, DNS should be handled by the ISP and go no further? I'm inferring here that you are including an ISP's peers as on the same tier, or something like that, and all I can see is that there are some good arguments for doing it either way, and you've really got me wondering what's so obviously flawed about one side of the debate that it settles the whole thing.
Who is John Cabal?
"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.
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;-}
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?
Interesting. I just did a Google search for president of Europe. The first three answers are correct.