A Look Into How Kids Search Online

Being the best website marketing service means that it’s essential to understand how to make your clients stand out in algorithms. This entails understanding how searchers behave, from oldest to youngest. 

There’s some very interesting Google research we dived into lately relating to how children search online. From noticing bold letters more to using simpler phrases, each data point helps with improving rankings and conversions in the long term.

Different Kinds of Online Search Behavior

Kids searching online can be divided into three main groups: power users, developing users, and distracted users.

Power Users

Power users are kids who know their way around a search bar; kids that are able to complete a search after search and use information gained to commit to the next step. These are also children who know the ins and outs of various inputs that can help them narrow down their searches into more relevant data. Although not necessarily super rare, they aren’t always the most common group either.  


Developing Users

Developing users are those who are able to do primary research but have limited knowledge of best practices. They can perform basic searches online, but they might not know the tricks to help sites like Google narrow down results. They can also typically lack the endurance of their power-user counterparts that can allow them to keep searching online.

Distracted Users

Distracted users are children who are less confident in their reading and writing skills or may even be too young to have a long enough attention span to attempt reading most text. These are the most picture-oriented online searchers, and they would tend to utilize image searching over the default.  


Children Quickly Take to Auto-Generated Answers

Children are also prone to taking research suggestions that are auto-populated in the search bars as answers. Although every group under the age of ten tends to look at pictures for their primary answer source, text-based replies can be dominated by what the search bar automatically fills. This also applies to how distracted children search online; they may take whatever appears for granted rather than perform any deep diving. 


Children Searching Online Often Misspell Words

How kids search online is directly linked with how strong their grasp is on English. Although Google, Bing, and other search engines have developed complex means to deal with this, it could greatly impact searches downstream. Thankfully, children seem inherently drawn to OneBox, which takes the most likely answer to even a misspelled question and provides it for the young searcher. 


How Kids Search Difficult Questions Online

When kids research things that are multifaceted, then it really gets interesting. Children are apt to try voice searching when possible, but they can’t always remember what was asked of them if it was in a longer format or had multiple parts. The more bland a question is, the less likely a child is to pay attention to the answer. Motivation is key when it comes to how kids search online, and an unmotivated searcher quickly becomes a distracted searcher. 


Kids Develop Online Searching Patterns

Fascinatingly, children that begin to go down a certain path of online research tend to stay on it as they develop and age. Since they become so used to searching for answers in one particular way, it becomes ingrained in their mental toolkit for navigating the Internet. Once things become familiar, even for adults, it’s challenging to swap over to a new methodology. 


How Children Search Online Matters

Even if the data doesn’t always seem actionable at first, the aggregate info gleaned from understanding how kids perform online searches is useful in the long run. For those who are interested in having their business or organization around for the foreseeable future, how one generation likes to research answers to their problems can impact how you market to them, their friends, and even their family members. When it comes to analyzing searching trends, it’s therefore critical not to count out the little guys! 

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