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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."
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.
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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.
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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
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.
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.
"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.