Simplifying Search For a Younger Audience 72
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."
Re:Wolfram Alpha? (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when I inhabited sci.space.* on usenet it was customary to detect school projects and to tell the poster to GTFO. Somehow I doubt wolfram will do that so I wonder how many school projects it will solve in their entirety.
Ask.com (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [practicalecommerce.com], 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.
Re:Kids aren't stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
This is exactly it...
I am a teenager, and even I can notice it. 30 seconds with a new piece of software I'm already better at than most adults 20 minutes in with the manual. They are incredulous, "How did you know how to do that?!?!" I have no explanation, it just seemed natural that that button is used for this, and if I want to do some heavy duty photo editing I'm going to need to download a crack for photoshop and etc... It just comes from growing up with technology.
Just leave things the way they are, kids will adapt and they'll probably be better at it than most adults in 20 minutes, just like I am now.
I have to second this.
People assume that just because they had a hard time adapting to technology as adults, that children would have an even harder time. I've found that the opposite is true. A family friend has an AD domain for his children's PCs, and they understood the concept of a 'user', 'logging in', etc... at the age of 4 or 5! I started programming in basic when I was about 7 years old, and I could code proficiently in C++ by 13. I remember having XT-era PCs at school, and even though we had very little time assigned to use them (a few hours a month), many students learned a lot of basic skills in no time at all.
I actually work for a department of education at the moment, and my instructions are not to "dumb down" apps too much for children. About the only thing I did was make some screen elements highlight during the "on mouse over" event, as very young children have poor hand-eye coordination. A strong visual effect helps them target and click more effectively. I've sen similar features in other "for kids" apps too.
I collect search logs from a library app used by about 600,000 children, and they search well enough. Junior kids tend to use shorter words ("dog" and "cat" are very popular terms), but other than that, they seem to find what they're looking for relatively quickly.
Just watch them and learn how they solve things (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ask.com (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think their search boxes not being big enough is the main improvement they need to work on.
In fact, there is empirical evidence that supports your idea: the average web search query is about 3 words long (depending on which search engine was examined, this varies +- 1 or so).
For example, see this paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=281250.281253&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=68253875&CFTOKEN=24736044 [acm.org]