Search engines for children

The purpose of this study is to investigate childrens possibilities to retrieve information by searching in searching engines designed for children. Two such search engines are examined: Yahooligans and Kids Click, both of which index pages in English only. I have compared Yahooligans with its equivalence for adults; Yahoo, by evaluating the retrieval effectiveness. Some functions in Kids Click and in Yahooligan are investigated. Seven class room studies are described in the prior research chapter. 28 queries were constructed and tested on Yahooligans and Yahoo. The measure of effectiveness used is average precision at seen relevant documents and average precision. The results show that the retrieval performance of Yahooligans is not as good as that of Yahoo. The average precision for Yahoo were much higher than that of Yahooligans. The average precision at seen relevant documents were similar, but Yahoos were a little higher. Yahooligans retrieved answers for 19 out of the 28 questions, despite of the fact that the questions constructed were on topics that children may be interested in. Yahooligans retrieved better on the queries were there was only one word in the keywords. An examination of several functions in Yahooligans and Kids Click were done. The functions investigated were: the help function, relevance ranking, spell-checking and feedback. The conclusion is that the search engines for children can be used in school, as a complement to the bigger search engines, since they have a web directory designed for children.Uppsatsnivå: