What and how children search on the web

Abstract

The Internet has become an important part of the daily life of children as a source of information and leisure activities. Nonetheless, given that most of the content available on the web is aimed at the general public, children are constantly exposed to inappropriate content, either because the language goes beyond their reading skills, their attention span differs from grown-ups or simple because the content is not targeted at children as is the case of ads and adult content. In this work we employed a large query log sample from a commercial web search engine to identify the struggles and search behavior of children of the age of 6 to young adults of the age of 18. Concretely we hypothesized that the large and complex volume of information to which children are exposed leads to ill-defined searches and to disorientation during the search process. For this purpose, we quantified their search difficulties based on query metrics (e.g. fraction of queries posed in natural language), session metrics (e.g. fraction of abandoned sessions) and click activity (e.g. fraction of ad clicks). We also used the search logs to retrace stages of child development. Concretely we looked for changes in the user interests (e.g. distribution of topics searched), language development (e.g. readability of the content accessed) and cognitive development (e.g. sentiment expressed in the queries) among children and adults. We observed that these metrics clearly demonstrate an increased level of confusion and unsuccessful search sessions among children. We also found a clear relation between the reading level of the clicked pages and the demographics characteristics of the users such as age and average educational attainment of the zone in which the user is located.

Query recommendation in the information domain of children

“…It has been widely reported (Craswell, Zoeter, Taylor, & Ramsey, ; Hua, Zhang, Liu, Ma, & Ru, ) that users tend to click on top‐ranked results even if these results do not contain the information that users are looking for. Duarte Torres and Weber () showed that this behavior is even stronger for younger users. The motivation behind using this restricted query set was to reduce this behavioral bias.…”

“…Similar age groups have been used in previous research on children's search behavior on the web and represent marked stages of child development (Duarte Torres & Weber, ). These groups were also selected because we can create models from the age ranges defined in the Dmoz directory.…”

“…Another important difference observed with respect to the experiments on the AOL data is that the performance gain is higher at top 5 suggestions than at top 10. This is a desirable result given the importance of ranking suggestions at the top positions in the case of children users (Duarte Torres & Weber, ). This result is also reflected by the low recall Bing has for the youngest group of users, particularly at top five (3.6% for users aged 8 and 9 years vs. 6.2% for adults).…”

Designing Information Retrieval Systems for Children's Use

“…Children tend to enter short, natural language queries, rather than using keywords or Boolean operators (Bilal & Kirby, 2002;Duarte Torres & Weber, 2011;Gossen, Low, & Nürnberger, 2011;Kammerer & Bohnacker, 2012;Marchionini, 1989;Solomon, 1993). Older studies indicated that children preferred browsing to keyword searching (Borgman, Hirsh, Walter, & Gallagher, 1995), but more recently, children have expressed a preference for keyword searching (Jochmann-Mannak, Huibers, Lentz, & Sanders, 2010); this may be because children are exposed to Google at a young age now.…”

The false trade‐off of relevance for safety in children's search systems

“…Such search portals are ostensibly designed to deliver safe, relevant information for novice Web users while supporting their cognitive and motor skills with child‐appropriate interfaces (Gossen, Hempel, & Nürnberger, ). Over the past 20 years, online searching for children has evolved from curated collections of materials in portal‐ and catalogue‐like interfaces to keyword‐based search engines that more closely approximate how adult tools look and function (see earlier work, e.g., Bilal, ; Druin et al, ; Duarte Torres & Weber, ; Schacter, Chung, & Dorr, ). What many of these search systems implicitly or explicitly acknowledged was the essential trade‐off of information quality and quantity in favor of safety.…”