

Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search - NEPatriot
http://gigaom.com/2010/09/13/usability-study-shows-kids-dont-search/

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scott_s
This part of the actual article contradicts the implication of the title:

 _I asked Nielsen if he thought children’s tendency towards an app mentality
was a broader trend, and that everyone would be less dependent on search in
the future — both because these habituated children will age into adulthood
and because alternatives to search like apps and the social web are growing in
usefulness. He said he didn’t think that was necessarily the case, because
kids in the upper age range of the study — 11 and 12 years old — were observed
to be avid searchers._

Further, the study itself (<http://www.nngroup.com/reports/kids/>) was on how
children used _websites_. Not on how children used the _the internet_. As far
as I can tell, he means that children did not use the search features on a
particular website. Which I rarely do, too. If I need to search a website, I
usually do a search on Google. I've learned that most websites have terrible
search results.

But even if the study had demonstrated that young children don't use search
engines to navigate the internet, it wouldn't necessarily mean that future
generations will use the internet differently. I think people tend to
underestimate how subtle searching the internet can be. We see a single text
box on Google's homepage, so it has to be simple, right? But that implies that
the work to figure out what to put in that text box must happen in our heads.
Being able to synthesize what you want to find into a few keywords that you
think are likely to be associated with what you're looking for requires
sophisticated cognition.

That, to me, would be an interesting psychology topic to study: how early can
we effectively search the internet? Is there any connection to the existing
models of cognitive development?

~~~
Swizec
You raise an interesting question. But ultimately the wrong kind of question.
We shouldn't be asking ourselves how early can humans effectively search the
internet. We should be researching how soon can humans make a search engine
that is natural enough a small kid can use.

Now I don't have any kids or access to anything of the sorts, but isn't 6
exactly the age kids start asking questions? Questions that are sometimes hard
to answer. This indicates that kids are in fact avid users of search, they
just aren't very good at translating their query into something google can
usefully understand.

Have you ever tried searching for something you didn't know how to exactly
specify? My recent example is seeing a cool car in London. Now that I know
what it's called I can just search for "morgan three wheeler". But the first
time 'round I started from "three wheel oldtimer" and probably a few others
like that, then looking through a lot of wikipedia etc.

Until we can make search engines behave like asking a human "Hey, that car
looked cool, what is it?" kids won't be avid searchers.

~~~
frossie
_isn't 6 exactly the age kids start asking questions?_

Yes but a 6 year old still believes their parents :-)

Seriously, the issue is that the questions young kids ask need a lot of
context to interpret - they are not the kind of thing you can type at a search
engine. For a (real) example a kindergartener watching a cartoon might ask
"why are they walking normal"? So the parent has to figure out that (a) the
cartoon characters are supposedly on Mars (b) the kid thinks Mars is like the
moon (c) the kid has seen footage of real astronauts on the moon (d) ergo the
kid had an expectation for the characters to walk "funny" on Mars.

The kid _is_ asking a good question, but is not able to form the googlable
question "What is the gravity on Mars"? It needs an adult (and frequently
specifically a familiar caregiver) to mediate the question it is asking to the
question that can be answered.

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jacobolus
Did anyone really expect 6–9 year-olds to be giant searchers? 6-year-olds have
only been reading for a couple of years, and are still mostly on picture
books, many reading aloud. Are they supposed to be typing complex text-based
queries into google to turn up mostly more text content?

~~~
scott_s
Two points. One, as I pointed out elsewhere, the study was not on searching
the internet, but on searching websites.

Two - and I'm sorry to pick on you because others are doing it - you're in
real danger of hindsight bias here:
<http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/>

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jakevoytko
_"kids navigate the web using bookmarks, remembering their favorite sites, and
accessing paid subscription content and games."_

My parents use the web like this. This isn't limited to children.

They navigate by clicking the address bar and clicking the URI they want. I
introduced them to "proper" navigation means, like RSS, bookmarks, and tabbed
browsing; they dismissed each as a gimmick. Their method has some big
advantages - they only need two clicks to navigate anywhere on the web, and
they're not beholden to any notifications. If they find a new webpage they
like, its already in their address bar. No management needed.

My way is much more complicated: I jump around the web using quick typing and
memorized keyboard shortcuts. I also use pages requiring management: Twitter,
Gmail, Google Reader, Facebook, etc. If I ignore the web for a week, I spend
days catching up or declare bankruptcy and start over. They don't need to do
this, since they have no notification debt to begin with.

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wmoulder
How much of this is parents' doing? When I showed my kids sites, I made it
clear that 'this is how you get to the fun stuff', and anything not that way
results in removal of computer privileges. Are kids discovering new content
through some medium other than parents or previous experience?

~~~
percept
Check the comments there--some parents are discussing this.

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barredo
Well, kids tend to access a few sites only. I did when I was younger. I mean:
What they need to do on a browser?

Facebook? Wikipedia for school? Hulu? I guess kids needs are more easily
found, they need to remember a few sites that cover a big percent of their
total usage.

I mean, it's not like they have to make some _hard_ research on topics they
are interested due to work or hobbies.

~~~
pragmatic
I think you nailed it. The sites they tend to visit are VERY important to
them. Do you remember being a kid? The video game you were playing or movie
you watched last night had the higher priority in your life. You don't have to
think about too much.

As an adult, you have an amazing branching tree of knowledge and interests.
You have to track so much information that everything has to become less
important.

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JoeAltmaier
Kids map everything by landmarks. Its a sign of maturity to leave this behind
and begin to organize a space by a metric.

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cmars232
In my experience as a father, I'd tend to agree. There is less reason to
search if you're primarily using the web for the games and interactive flash
that is typically geared towards kids, but there's no reason we can't create
more opportunities for kids to search. I'll give an example.

My younger son recently got into pokemon, and he's now doing more self-
directed searches on Bulbapedia to learn about stats & strategies. Since this
is something I can't help him with, he's learning how to search on his own.

Searching for pokemon stats, game cheats and walkthroughs sounds trivial but
learning how to play with search, sort through the false positives, invalid
file sizes, fake sites, etc., these skills carry over.

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david927
Which is why, for kids under 12, a simple portal of white-listed sites, such
as Kongoroo(<http://kongoroo.com>), is more important than Google.

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yock
Some very interesting observations there. I don't expect that search would
ever go away completely. Society has always had a need to locate new,
unfamiliar information. That being said, what might such a stark change in the
way a new generation uses technology mean for the current corporate technology
giants? Could this be trouble for a company like Google that is nearly
completely leveraged on their search functionality?

~~~
nkassis
I don't think this is true. Search will always be important in my view. I
don't see the rate of new information being created going down and this makes
good search even more important.

Let's not forget that searching the web requires literacy and an idea of what
you want to look for. Formulating queries is something that might require a
certain maturity to do. Kids learn to search at an older age naturally in my
view.

A lot of us are in a generation that started using the web pre-google during
the Yahoo years (;p) . Using Yahoo was more like clicking around on a portal
website that the kids under 12 (at least in this article) are using today.
Once google came around most of us started using it almost as if it was
natural. (well I migrated to altavista before that and I was 12 when google
showed up. but that's my experience).

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fbailey
What should they search for? Behavior is partly shaped by need, we need to
research a lot of topics for our daily live (work,living ...) kids don't have
to do that, so they don't get used to it. They will change when they grow
older.

