Searching With Kids Revisited
Joyce Kasman Valenza
Move over Yahooligans. The field of student search tools is getting a bit crowded. You may have noticed the emergence of a number of new tools designed especially for use in the K-12 searching arena.
There are several reasons why the emergence of these children's search tools is a breakthrough.
Access and appropriateness are important.
Children deserve to be able to find those materials designed especially for them without enormous frustration and the distraction of questionable results. Teachers and parents, as well, ought to be able to quickly identify quality, age-appropriate material for use with students. Adult search engines, overwhelming in size, offer result lists way beyond manageable for most adults, let alone kids. For teachers concerned about inappropriate results, general purpose search tools are problematic. A student who might innocently type the word “doll” in a search tool like AltaVista, would face site descriptions having little to do with his or her interest in collecting dolls. Though students' access to Web sites may be filtered in many schools, their result lists are not.
And there's a reason close to the hearts of librarians.
Searching is a critical life skill. Younger students need manageable areas to practice honing their abilities to identify topics and keywords and to develop strategies for evaluating the relevance, reliability and usefulness of Web materials to their own work.
Let's review the unique features of each of the student search tools.
Yahooligans!, the Web Guide for Kids, debuted in 1996, as the first major subject directory designed just for children. Its database, selected for ages 7 through 12, is neatly divided into manageable categories in the style of its parent site Yahoo. Results lead searchers to helpful categories as well as individual sites. Yahooligan's Cool area is a growing archive of some of the best age-appropriate stuff on the Web. The Download area allows children to search for images, sounds and videos Teachers will find helpful guides for teaching searching, citing sources and evaluating web pages. Yahooligans, slightly less “academic” than some of the others in the class, offers handy links to the essentials of popular culture—currently Pokemon, movie stars and wrestling. Though no specific selection policy appears, the FAQs explain “Yahooligans! lists the sites that users want to see most and categorizes them into appropriate subject categories.”
Ask Jeeves for Kids is a hybrid search tool. Students move from highly selective database of sites to a “meta-search” in two other appropriate search spaces. When a student enters a question or keyword into the search box, Ask Jeeves for Kids first searches its extensive Knowledgebase of thousands of question templates and researched answers, returning results in the form of related questions. The Knowledgebase contains “only G-rated Web pages and Web pages written specifically for children.” When a student's question is not answered within the resources of the Knowledgebase, he has the option of moving below the green line on the results page to a search in one of AskJeeves' partner sites, Yahooligans or Education World's over 115,000 sites for educators. Jeeves' kid-friendly features include its natural language search engine, which encourages children to ask their questions in plain English and demands no knowledge of sophisticated searching syntax. Spelling demands are relaxed, as well. Click the “check my spelling” box and Jeeves will offer gentle suggestions.
KidsClick!, a highly selective subject directory, was created by the hard-working librarians at the Ramapo Catskill Library System, as an alternative to a filtered approach to the Web. Its mission is to “guide young users to valuable age-appropriate web sites.” Among the excellent building blocks for this database, were the American Library Association's 700+ Great Sites for Kids! and Jean Armour Polly's book, The Internet Kids and Family Yellow Pages. There is no distracting advertising here. Expect serious quality in site descriptions and reading level assessments. Search options are extremely flexible. Students may search by keyword, category, alphabetically, reading level, even Dewey number or quantity of graphics to download. An advanced search mode enables users to search terms in the subject, title or description fields.
The Awesome Library offers doors to teachers, kids, parents, and librarians and "organizes the Web with 19,000 carefully reviewed resources, including the top 5 percent in education." Berit's Best Sites, by the creators of Theodore Tugboat, is a directory of the best 1000 sites for children under 12.
And finally there is a new portal for the very little ones. Alfy is designed for the many children who want to find fun, age-appropriate material on the Web but may be too young to type or manage all those spelling and word choice decisions that we older folks take for granted as we search. Designed for ages 3 through 10, Alfy is an icon-driven interface in which children explore subjects by clicking on graphics. Included sites meet Alfy's four selection criteria for young children: “subjects that specifically attract and interest children. . . short or simple texts that kids can handle easily; sites that do not contain any material which is offensive for kids; and sites that are attractive for kids, “using such elements as eye-popping graphics, animation, sounds.” Indeed children using Alfy will find a screen busy with color, Java action, and a surfboarding doggie host. They should be able to drill down through “animals” to sites about bears in three clicks. I got a bit dizzy and would have appreciated some text to guide me.
Though they may be a huge step forward, children's tools are not the total answer. The children's search tools are essentially directories rather than full search engines. Unlike search engines that send their software spiders (or robots) out into the wide world of the Web to bring back matching sites, most of the children's tools are selected databases of child-oriented sites. While you gain in manageability, you certainly lose in scope. As I tested these search tools, I was generally satisfied with the results in general topic areas. My searches for material relating to curricular standards--dinosaurs and presidents and wars--resulted in leads to solid Web sites, appropriate for use K-8. But my current events search on East Timor and a similar one on the recent earthquake in Turkey were flops in most of the search tools. Only two stood up to a current events test. For East Timor, AskJeeves offered a manageable number of relevant links. Searchopolis returned well over 15,000 links, which would need to be evaluated for point of view, authority and bias. Limiting that search list and evaluating the result lists would be important practice for students. With the exception of Searchopolis, most secondary students would have been frustrated by the limited scope of the children's search tools in this area.
The bottom line? Children need to be aware of a larger Web tool-kit. Though they might do well to start in Ask Jeeves for Kids, StudyWeb, KidsClick! or Yahooligans, they will frequently need to move on. Of all the student tools, Searchopolis offers the largest scope. KidsClick! results are the most selective. But that East Timor search would have been most successful in a news source like CNN.com. Students may need training wheels, but they must learn to venture without them if they are going to go the distance. It is important that we know when to lead our students to the search tools we ourselves rely on. It is important to teach them to calmly avoid results that are clearly inappropriate. Teachers and parents with safety concerns regarding searching might lead children to any of the major search tools offering filtered Web search areas. Try AOL's Netfind Kids Only. Activate SearchGuard on Lycos, or the Family Filter on AltaVista, with its optional password protection. These adult-oriented search tools allow students the larger scope they often need as well as some protection against results lists with the potential to embarrass or offend.
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