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Friday, January 12, 2007

Quintura Kids Search Engine

Just recently, Cranky.com presented us with a search engine aimed at older people (receiving mixed comments). Quintura on the other hand now gives us a search engine for kids. It was kinda slow loading here when I tried first, presenting you a large background image, a tag cloud, a search box and a couple of graphics-only icons (e.g. a handheld game console icon linking to a search for games, or a dog icon linking to a search for animals). I asked Yakov Sadchikov, Quintura’s co-founder from Russia, a couple of questions:

Q: What do you think kids want from a search engine?

Yakov: Kids want to find what they are really looking for as easy and quickly as possible and not to search for it.

Q: What do you think Google doesn’t offer to kids, or where do you think Google isn’t very kid-friendly?

Yakov: It doesn’t help to find information with one click. It doesn’t offer an easy and quick way to make and refine a query. Its search interface is not friendly for kids.

Kids often do not know how to make a search query. They would rather use an interactive tag cloud and navigate through the cloud to find information. Quintura teaches kids how to search through the cloud of related tags/words/phrases.

Using a keyboard and typing query words in a search box is a barrier for kids. They often make orthographical errors while typing. Then they cannot easily and quickly find what they look for and loose their interest to searching.

It returns too many irrelevant results that disorient children and make them lose attention to an initial search topic while looking [through] those results.

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