Ask.com makes you feel like a kid again

With the launch of the new Ask.com kid`s website I know that there will be thousands of parents wondering if this is actually the first real “kids” search engine.

AskKids.com is said to be the best kids search engine so far. They have a fun, interactive home page for children where they can draw and play around with different stickers. This is sure to keep the kids entertained for a while. I even spent a few minutes making some drawings out of my name and creating funny faces.

There is also a school house option that takes you to a results page with different school subjects and sites that could help children with their studies. There are 3 different age levels: kids, teens and advanced teens. Kids is for children who are still in primary school, teens are those children who are moving from primary school to high school and advanced teens are those who are in the upper high school grades. To help with navigation there is a filter for various subjects and other resources in the left hand menu.

In the images menu you will find some popular image searches that include sunflowers, pyramids, Zac Efron, jellyfish and the Amazon River. There is also a video search that will give you video results for popular searches, including volcanoes, dog shows, the Great Wall of China, Harry Potter and the world cup. This is exactly the kind of thing that kids enjoy and anybody can imagine them searching for this kind of stuff.

Let`s move on to the actual search function of AskKids.com. Ask created a “very strict” list of sites for AskKids, so you would expect to see only sites that are relevant to children of 17 years old or younger. I did a search for “Jack Daniels” and some of the results I saw were very surprising and somewhat shocking. There is one result that goes to eBay, which I presume leads to somebody selling a bottle of alcohol. In the left hand menu there is a link to “Jack Daniels recipes” and under “expand your search” they have suggestions like Vodka, Smirnoff, Bacardi, Southern Comfort and beer. Now I know for a fact that no parents in the world want their kids to come across something like this while they are doing their homework.

Overall I think that AskKids.com is a great site for children but there are still a few problems that need to be sorted out to make it a valid children`s website.