Ask Jeeves for Kids

The Ask Jeeves for Kids website (askkids.com) website encourages kids to ask questions in plain English. It tries its best to answer the question, but because computers aren't as savvy as parents they sometimes misunderstand the questions that people ask. Ask Jeeves for Kids tries to get round any possible misunderstandings by rephrasing questions and asking kids to refine their searches. Unfortunately this can lead to more problems than it solves. 

Ask Jeeves for Kids - a worked example

Try typing type What is the size of the moon? into Ask Jeeves for Kids. When I tried this, the search results were excellent. For instance, the first result came from NASA, a place every kid has heard of and respects! But no concessions were made for kids on this page. This is fine, kids have to learn that web sometimes produces results that only adult scientists might understand. Fortunately:

• Ask Jeeves for Kids places results from answers.askkids.com high in the search results.

So immediately after being baffled, but hopefully intrigued, by the NASA page, you get a kid friendly answer from askkids.com itself.

If you type the same question into Ask Jeeves itself you don't get search results returned from answers.askkids.com, at least not in a high place in the listings. This shows that askkids.com is serious about being for kids, it's not just the vanilla Jeeves search engine with some childish graphics thrown in.

Ask Jeeves for Kids - some problems

Although I'm quite impressed how Ask Jeeves for Kids performs a basic search am less happy with the supposedly helpful extension sthat appear in the left margin. In our example, the following items appeared in the left margin:

Narrow Your Search
How Big Is the Moon
What Is the Moon Made of
What Is the Diameter of the Moon
How Large Is the Moon
Facts about the Moon
Expand Your Search
What Is the Size of the Sun
Moon's Diameter
Earth's Moon
Distance between Moon Earth
Solar System

There are several problems with these search suggestions:

• The grammar is awful. Many of these items are questions, so why don't they come with question marks? Also, why are words in the sentence capitalized? Jeeves should be teaching children good English by example.
• The question What is the moon made of? is not "narrowing the search", it's broadening the search. So Jeeves is making errors in semantics as well as in grammar.

The grammar problems can be easily fixed, and one hopes that Ask will fix them soon. But the semantic problems are harder. Jeeves is probably recommending What is the moon made of? as a narrowing question because computers simply don't have the same grasp of semantics as people.

For a quick fix, Ask could forget about putting the questions into semantic categories and, with grammar fixes, you might end up with something like:

Related questions
How big is the moon?
What is the moon made of?
What is the diameter of the moon?
How large is the moon?
What is the size of the sun?

Interesting facts
Facts about the Moon
Moon's Diameter
Distance between Moon Earth
Solar System