The AskJeeves product for kids, www.ajkids.com, leaves much to be
desired.
This past summer I taught a seminar for our teachers on online databases
and the web, and thoroughly enjoyed myself finding examples of lousy
search results using various search engines. (I know, it's like
shooting fish in a barrel, and constructing a proper search takes care
of a lot of it. Still fun.)
Try searching "J.K. Rowling" on ajkids and you get a biography several
years and two books out of date, after you scroll past the "ads by
google" that appear to be part of the search results. Search on "pandas"
and you get an amateurish looking report on the panda, some broken
links, and (I love this) a link to a story on "Plastic telephones
recalled by TDT Toy company." Oh, and a link to a site on otters. In
Gaelic.
All this is doubly infuriating, because doing identical searches in the
"parent" search engine at ask.com returns some very good results.
It looks like they work so hard at paring down the results and
presenting a simple format to kids that they remove all useful
information.
Gary's comments on the need for some outreach to the education community
from major search engines are right on target.
Anne-Marie Gordon, Librarian
Livonia Primary School
Livonia, NY
agordon@livoniacsd.org
http://www.livoniacsd.org/primaryschool/gordon/index.htm
"A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessities of life." Henry
Ward Beecher.
>>> gary price <gary@RESOURCESHELF.COM> 10/02/05 10:46 AM >>>
One thing is for sure, I applaud Answers.com for reaching out to the
K-12 communuity... I've blogged a great deal over a long period of time
about how major web engines need to do more and reach out to the
education community...
Also, have you seen what Ask Jeeves has been doing for the past 4.5
years.
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