Design criteria for children's Web portals: the users speak out
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Differences and similarities in information seeking: children and adults as web users
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Issues of context in information retrieval
Designing games with a purpose
Communications of the ACM - Designing games with a purpose
Towards methods for the collective gathering and quality control of relevance assessments
Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Improving search engines using human computation games
Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
Children's roles using keyword search interfaces at home
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Fu-Finder: a game for studying querying behaviours
Proceedings of the 20th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
Children's information retrieval: beyond examining search strategies and interfaces
FDIA'08 Proceedings of the 2nd BCS IRSG conference on Future Directions in Information Access
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Evaluating the children's information seeking behaviors and information retrieval abilities poses a number of difficult challenges for researchers to overcome. One of the main problems is engaging children to undertake search tasks so that their abilities at retrieving relevant information can be assessed. In this poster paper, we outline PageFetch, which is an Information Retrieval based game designed to engage information seekers of all ages, but particular, children, to play and thus provide valuable data to assess and compare their search abilities to other age groups. We also report the results from an initial pilot study using PageFetch where over 140 participants played approximately 1500 games. While, previous research has shown that children do not perform as well as adults, our finding suggest that given modern search engines, children (or more specifically teenagers) are more than capable of finding specified pages - and in fact for topics that they are more likely to be interested in, they often out perform adults. Since, these findings are very preliminary, they do raise a number of questions about the quality of modern search engines and the search efficacy of younger searchers. This work motivates the undertaking of secondary and larger study that examines on a year by year basis how search skills develop and improve from childhood to adulthood.