In this vision paper, we spotlight children as often underserved users in the digital ecosystem. With online search as a use case, we discuss the need for a multi-perspective approach to designing interactive interfaces and technologies that can enable information access systems to better respond to children's requirements while respecting the cultural and social norms impacting their upbringing.
it is not surprising that the resources they are exposed
to influence how they see the world. At the same time,
there is no “stereotypical child searcher”: each searcher is
Search engines (SE) are a “powerful intermediary” [
We advocate for a greater examination of users im- and Kwanzaa. Adult searchers may reformulate their pacted by the power of SE, starting with children. For queries to include “non-christmas,” resulting in the top-2 these young searchers, SE are the portals to leisure and results being mostly culture-agnostic, but by the 3, the educational resources [8]. As children develop, they be- sole holiday mentioned is Christmas (Fig 1b). Nonethecome more aware of the reality surrounding them. Thus, less, children are known to struggle with query (re)formulation [9], which might hinder their ability to find Joint Proceedings of the ACM IUI Workshops 2023, March 2023, Sydney, results that match their beliefs and expectations. This *ACuostrrraelsiaponding author. issue is not restricted to Google as Bing yielded similar re$ M.S.Pera@TUDelft.nl (M. S. Pera); sults. KizSearch, which is designed for children, retrieved katherinewright@boisestate.edu (K. L. Wright); Christmas-related cookie recipes for both queries. caseykennington@boisestate.edu (C. Kennington); Retrieved results are an artifact of the SE’s attempt jerryfails@boisestate.edu (J. A. Fails) to provide the most frequently useful results for most httphstt:/p/sw:/w/swol.elipnekread.ginit.hcoumb.i/oin//(kMat.hSe.rPinerealw); right/ (K. L. Wright); people. But identifying “most people” requires an ashttps://www.caseyreddkennington.com (C. Kennington); sumption of the norm, and excludes those who deviate https://www.boisestate.edu/coen-kidsteam-hci/jerryfails/ from that group [10]. The issue of exclusion goes beyond (J. A. Fails) religious traditions. While Christmas is widely celebrated 0000-0002-2008-9204 (M. S. Pera); 0000-0002-6782-3453 in many Latin American countries, gingerbread cookies (0K0.0L0.-0W00r1ig-6h1t)3;90-010106-20(0J0. 1A-.66F5a4il-s8)966 (C. Kennington); on the SERP are not common. The concern here is not © 2023 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License simply that Christmas dominates the SERP. True, many CPWrEooUrckReshdoinpgs IhStpN:/c1e6u1r3-w-0s.o7r3g ACttEribUutRion W4.0oInrtekrnsahtioonpal (PCCroBYce4.0e).dings (CEUR-WS.org) people celebrate Christmas and cookies are perhaps a (a) ‘holiday cookies’ (b) ‘holiday cookies non-christmas’ (c) ‘holiday cookies non-christmas’ more integrated part of this celebration than other win- how interactive interfaces and technologies could also ter traditions. However, the absence of representation be adopted to improve other search modalities such as of other cultural heritages sends an implicit message of mobile devices and voice assistants. who the internet is for and, more importantly, who it Lessons learned emerging from this use case can also is not for. This also spotlights the missed opportunity impact the design of other information access tools, such of using search tools as a means to foster cross-cultural as recommender systems, so that they can explicitly mitiunderstanding [11]. gate stereotypes and address cultural and social aspects about children, in addition to promoting diverse representation and in turn fostering a sense of belonging.
With this work, we emphasize the need for SE to leverage interactive interfaces and technologies to attain broader representation and better serve children. Starting for example with the use of clarifying questions [12] which is already an alternative to disambiguating traditional users’ information needs and helping them navigate the oftentimes overwhelming information space (Fig. 1c). In this context, clarifying questions could also help diversify SERP results, without burdening children with reformulation. Children expect SE to cater to their specific intent [13], and therefore disambiguating possible intents would require alternative categorizations of what could be searched for. Instead of simply being derived from an existing English vocabulary, as is the case with traditional search (i.e., terms that are observed by crawlers on indexed websites), this more child-oriented ontology would expose children to a more diverse set of results for them to learn from (e.g., christmas is-a holiday at a time of year when there are other holidays, so SERP resources should include other holidays). Filtering is another aspect influenced by cultural and social constructs. Safe search filters are known to eradicate lewd content; still, there are other topics for which agreement might not be as uniform [14, 15]. Presenting a mixed-language list of resources on SERP [16] could better support children growing up in multilingual households. These are just a few ideas to consider. We invite readers to think about
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