Searching seems simple enough, so do children really need a search engine of their own? Yes, yes they do. See, children don’t need a clean and simple layout, they need something that will make searching easier. Big text, colorful pictures, and easy to read search results are all probably great features for a child search engine, but a new kid’s search engine, Quintura Kids, takes it to the next level.  Quintura Kids, the new child in the family for Quintura search, aims to make searching easier for children with their nifty “cloud search” feature. All a child has to do is click on a tag word, such as Television, and they are presented with sub-tags such as “Titles” or “The Cheetah Girls.” And they can continue clicking on these tags or enter their own preference to get more specific results.  The Russian version is here.

This function may actually be practical for the little ones, especially since it unlikely that they have mastered the ability to enter in the right words to get the results they want. One more thing which I enjoyed was that the results are presented right below the search textbox and that you are not diverted away from the page once you search. The only complaint I have is that the name Quintura might be a little hard for the kids to remember, and maybe even easy to make fun of. Kids are ruthless; they still call me “Sushi Sasha.” 

Another new kid on the block, but with a much more familiar name, is Ask Kids. The parent of this child oriented search is none other than good old Ask.com. Just like Quintura the main purpose of Ask Kids is to make searching easier by providing pre-set options. It provides categories like Schoolhouse, Movies, and Games, then provides more specific subjects under each category. Both Ask Kids and Quintura try to present the children with options and keywords which they might not have known about.  See, most kids don’t realize that there are services on the web that do most of their school work for them, so they might not know about the godsend that is Sparknotes. This way they can Stumbleupon these websites with the help of these specific categories.

Overall Ask Kids offers several useful tools such as the binoculars which give you a small preview of the webpage, or Smart Answers which provides a fast and simple overview of the search term right at the top of the results page. My only complaint for Ask Kids would be the yellowish-orange lined paper background which is featured throughout the website. Then again, I’ve never been fond of lined paper, or anything that reminds me of school for that matter.

By Sasha Lahijanian

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.