Usability Study Shows Kids Don’t Search
gigaom.comThis 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?
Good catch on the <11 demographic. In my experience, children in that age range tend to be heavy mouse users. They click on the site they want to go to and then click around the site, using the keyboard only when instructed to do so. It's not until around the aforementioned "upper age range" that they start seriously using the keyboard.
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.
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.
Before we do any of that, we have to determine if children are already effective with current search engines. It's possible you want to build something no one needs. The study linked here did not establish that.
Sometimes, if my understanding of what I want is fuzzy, or I just don't want to expend the mental effort to synthesize good search terms, I'll just pass a naive question to Google. It often helps me down the path to determining better keywords, and occasionally it finds what I'm looking for.
In other words: what you want might already exist. We don't know until we study it.
>isn't 6 exactly the age kids start asking questions?
Uh, no. My kids were asking good questions by age 3 or so.
Google goggles perhaps? Take a photo of the cool car and have google goggles identify it. I don't think language processing is the answer here -- image/video/audio search (which use those formats as the search term) is probably the way forward.
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?
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/
"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.
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?
Check the comments there--some parents are discussing this.
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.
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.
Kids map everything by landmarks. Its a sign of maturity to leave this behind and begin to organize a space by a metric.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.