A Closer Look at Children's Information Retrieval Usage

Access to information suitable and understandable for children is key to their development. Regrettably, current state-of-the-art Information Retrieval (IR) is mainly made with adults in mind, resulting in IR systems that do not suit children well: they require complicated queries and often retrieve inapprioriate results in a format unsuitable for children. To confirm this, this paper presents four groups of salient problems children have with IR. To explain these problems, a comprehensive review of children's use of IR systems is given, defining relevant aspects of the user, system, interaction, and context, and relating these to the search performance of children. Based on this framework, an integrative perspective on relevance is proposed, specificially geared at children's needs. It is proposed that complexity, interestingness, and affective value are key relevance criteria for children, and should be incorporated in an information system for children, if to arrive at an optimal search result and experience