Children's Web Searches - Top 100 Search Terms

Symantec recently released a list of the top 100 searches (actually 101 due to ties) performed by children online. The data was gathered through their OnlineFamily.Norton product, a web monitoring and filtering service.

The data was compiled between February 2009 and July 2009 and represents the aggregated readout of 3.5 million searches tracked by the service. While I wish Symantec had released more data (weighted age range and search engine usage statistics come to the top of my mind), I was grateful to have this glimpse into the mind of the connected child.

Most of the media coverage around this data set centered on the headline-ready fact that almost 10 percent of the search terms were, shall we say, adult in nature. However, if we can move past the unsurprising fact that children are curious about human sexuality, a few interesting trends can be discovered about internet usage patterns for the under-18 set.

Insight 1: Searching for Sites

Almost immediately, I was struck by the prevalence of searching for specific websites in addition to searching for content. 43 of the 101 most popular searches were for specific sites such as Google, Myspace, and Hulu. Why search for YouTube or Facebook or Walmart or Amazon when the site's address is a .com away? Even more confusing, 9 of the 43 searches included .com as part of the search criteria.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on here, though I suspect it's some combination of the following two conjectures.

Conjecture A: Improper understanding of the name of a service vs. its URL
Younger users may be confused if they're going to the site Ask or going to Ask.com / Gmail or Gmail.com / MySpace or MySpace.com. While we could debate whether this actually matters, it may explain why users search for the domain extension almost a quarter of the time they search for a service.

Conjecture B: Pure habit
A large portion of the searching for sites trend may also be a simple matter of habit. There's no need to learn a new navigational paradigm because the one being used, searching for everything, works just fine. Stated another way, who cares if you could type your destination in a different input field when the field you currently use always finds the places you want to go.

Insight 2: Searching for Search Engines
Another big trend within searching for sites was, interestingly enough, searching for search engines. 6 percent of searches were for traditional search engines (the Googles and Yahoo!s of the world). If you include YouTube in this mix (after all it's been the 2nd largest search engine for almost a year now), the portion of searches for search engines almost doubles to 11 percent. Stated another way, over 10 percent of searches performed by children were for search engines other than the one the child was currently using.

Insight 3: Overall Usage
Below are some quick segmentations I compiled for both site and content based searches. Distilled and aggregated, it quickly becomes apparent that children, much like adults, use the internet primarily to connect with others, read the latest celebrity gossip and entertain themselves.

The full list of search terms can be found here.

On an side note, I assembled these charts with the help of the "Create A Graph" tool on the NCES Kids' Zone Web site. NCES Kids' Zone is an edutainment portal run by the National Center for Educational Statistics, a department of the US Department for Education.

posted by Ben Tomassetti