The authors note that electronic media can “overwhelm
youth with information that they may not have the skills or experience to
evaluate.” It suggests
strategies that could address the “the information quality challenge that young
users face,” including “[s]pecially designed and tailored tech-tools such as,
for instance, kid-friendly browsers and search engines…or aggregators….” But the report adds the caveat that “it
seems unlikely that youth will embrace special search engines…developed just
for them…. [I]t is far more probable that children will seek out the websites
and tools that adults use—the websites and tools that they would eventually
graduate to using anyway, as they grow older.”
The caveats confirm for me our strategy in
developing and positioning SweetSearch.
Our content site, findingDulcinea initially
offered a broad range of curated content. By February 2009, we realized that users’ obsession with search was not going away, so we launched SweetSearch
to enable users to search only the sites we had approved. When it became clear that students were the most loyal audience for both SweetSearch and findingDulcinea, we began to focus our content
and marketing efforts on them. We repositioned SweetSearch as
“A Search Engine for Students.” We also removed any Web sites that lacked journalistic or academic rigor, and added hundreds of
sites with primary source material or educational videos; these efforts are
continuing.
Over the past year, we’ve discussed our products, and the
needs of students, with thousands of educators and students at events ranging
from national conferences to one-on-one meetings, and have also reviewed
thousands of school Web sites. We’ve heard some outstanding feedback on SweetSearch and
have seen a good number of widgets downloaded to school library Web sites, but we
also appreciate constructive criticism that could help us improve the
product.
Some educators have expressed concern that SweetSearch does
not block words from being searched, and returns results for
sexuality-based queries, even though the links are only to information-based
websites. Many have encouraged us
to develop a “SweetSearch for Kids” that would include only content
appropriate, from both a subject matter and reading level perspective, for kids
under 12. Others have wondered if
it’s not helpful to students to provide a curated search engine that deprives
them of the experiencing of sorting through the vast mix of Web sites of uneven
quality offered by general search engines. Conversely, a good number of schools offer little advice to
their students regarding appropriate Web sites, and prefer instead to direct
them to licensed proprietary databases.
Students should sift
through Google to sort the helpful and unhelpful Web site as an occasional exercise, just as boot camp instructors sometimes require
their charges to run while carrying weights. But as I explain in a previous post,
in the pre-Internet days, the school librarian directed us to pre-screened resources on a subject, and then we decided which ones were the most relevant to our
research. That’s what SweetSearch does for students using the
Internet. Students cannot efficiently distinguish good online content from bad until they have years of practice,
and the wisdom and experience that comes only from age. Students learn to write in part by
reading a lot of well-written books; students who use SweetSearch extensively will
begin to learn the names of the most useful Web sites. And because SweetSearch, while focused
on students, also offers a broad range of content, it will be, unlike databases
and “kid friendly” search engines, one of “the
websites and tools that they would eventually graduate to using anyway.”
Thank you for reading,
Chief Executive Officer
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