Children searching information on the Internet: Performance on children's interfaces compared to Google

Children frequently make use of the Internet to search for information. However, research shows that children experience many problems with searching and browsing the web. The last decade numerous search environments have been developed, especially for children. Do these search interfaces support children in effective information-seeking? And do these interfaces add value to today’s popular search engines, such as Google? In this explorative study, we compared children’s search performance on four interfaces designed for children, with their performance on Google. We found that the children did not perform better on these interfaces than on Google. This study also uncovered several problems that children experienced with these search interfaces, which can be of use for designers of future search interfaces for children

Managing a portal of digital web resources by content syndication

As users become more accustomed to continuous Internet access, they will have less patience with the offering of disparate resources. A new generation of portals is being designed that aids users in navigating resource space and in processing the data they retrieved. Such portals offer added value by means of content syndication: the effort to have multiple, federated? resources co-operate in order to profit optimally from their synergy. A portal that offers these advantages, however, can only be of lasting value if it is sustainable. We sketch a way to set up and run an organisation that can manage a content syndication portal in a sustainable way.\ud \u

Measuring children's search behaviour on a large scale

Children often experience problems during information-seeking using traditional search interfaces and search technologies, that are designed for adults. This is because children engage with the world in fundamentally different ways than adults. To design search technologies that support children in effective and enjoyable information-seeking, more research is needed to examine children’s specific skills and needs concerning information-seeking. Therefore, we developed an application that can monitor children’s search behaviour on a large scale. In this paper, we present the steps taken to develop this application. The basis of the application is UsaProxy, an existing system that is used to monitor the user’s usage of websites. We have increased the accuracy of UsaProxy and have developed an application that is able to extract useful information from UsaProxy’s log files