YooSee: A Video Browser for Children

Moderated YouTube videos are presented using a globe metaphor where the children can browse around the video sphere of content using the continuous horizontal and vertical carousels. The application can be downloaded from the PuppyIR project on Sourceforge.

What and How Children Search on the Web

by Sergio Duarte Torres and Ingmar Weber (Yahoo! Research)

The Internet has become an important part of the daily life of children as a source of information and leisure activities. Nonetheless, given that most of the content available on the web is aimed at the general public, children are constantly exposed to inappropriate content, either because the language goes beyond their reading skills, their attention span differs from grown-ups or simple because the content is not targeted at children as is the case of ads and adult content. In this work we employed a large query log sample from a commercial web search engine to identify the struggles and search behavior of children of the age of 6 to young adults of the age of 18. Concretely we hypothesized that the large and complex volume of information to which children are exposed leads to ill-defined searches and to dis-orientation during the search process. For this purpose, we quantified their search difficulties based on query metrics (e.g. fraction of queries posed in natural language), session metrics (e.g. fraction of abandoned sessions) and click activity (e.g. fraction of ad clicks).

We also used the search logs to retrace stages of child development. Concretely we looked for changes in the user interests (e.g. distribution of topics searched), language development (e.g. readability of the content accessed) and cognitive development (e.g. sentiment expressed in the queries) among children and adults. We observed that these metrics clearly demonstrate an increased level of confusion and unsuccessful search sessions among children. We also found a clear relation between the reading level of the clicked pages and the demographics characteristics of the users such as age and average educational attainment of the zone in which the user is located.

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Amuse in PuppyIR

A demo of a multimedia search and browsing based interface for children. The interface is designed to facilitate the exploration of video content by browsing with images. This demo was created by Leif Azzopardi, Doug Dowie and Kelly Marshall as part of the PuppyIR project.

Emma Search Service

This demonstrator showcases the PuppyIR framework by incorporating a numerous child specific components developed as part of the PuppyIR project. The Demonstrator is for Emma’s Children’s Hospital in Amsterdam and provides children with a novel and exciting interface to help support their information needs while in hospital or visiting the hospital.

Google Kids: The Sequel

Michael Agger from Slate Magazine discusses PuppyIR research and other search for kids initiatives, see: http://www.slate.com/id/2296824/

Child-oriented multimedia results with collAge

A picture is worth a thousand search results: finding child-oriented multimedia results with collAge

by Karl Gyllstrom and Marie-Francine Moens

We present a simple and effective approach to complement search results for children's web queries with child-oriented multimedia results, such as coloring pages and music sheets. Our approach determines appropriate media types for a query by searching Google's database of frequent queries for co-occurrences of a query's terms (e.g., "dinosaurs") with preselected multimedia terms (e.g., "coloring pages"). We show the effectiveness of this approach through an online user evaluation.

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ImagePile: an Alternative for Vertical Results Lists

by Saskia Akkersdijk, Merel Brandon, Hanna Jochmann-Mannak, Djoerd Hiemstra, and Theo Huibers

Recent work shows that children are very well capable of searching with Google, due to their familiarity with the interface. However, children do have difficulties with the vertical list representation of the results. In this paper, we present an alternative result representation for a touch interface, the ImagePile. The ImagePile displays the results as a pile of images where the user navigates through via horizontal swiping. This representation was tested on a search engine for the Emma child hospital's library. Using a within subject experiment, both representations were tested with children to compare the usability of both systems. The vertical representation was perceived as easier to use, but the ImagePile system was considered more fun to use. Also, with the ImagePile system more relevant results were chosen by the children, and they were more aware of the number of results.

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