For this assignment, I utilized four search engines.

Since my target age range for

teaching is high school students, I chose two specific kid-friendly engines such as they might use

at school, and two more commonly used by adults:

- Kiddle
- SweetSearch
- Google
- Bing
. Since I plan to teach secondary English, I decided to research “Shakespeare.” I

qualified that by assuming that the students might need to research Shakespeare for biographical

information and that they might differentiate between academic sources (.edu) and other

institutions (.org). Therefore the search strings I used in each engine were:

- Shakespeare
- Shakespeare + biography
- Shakespeare + site:edu
- Shakespeare + site:org
- Shakespeare + biography + site:edu
- Shakespeare + biography + site:org
The number of hits I obtained using the same strings in each engine are demonstrated in the

following chart:

Shakespear Shakespear Shakespear Shakespear Shakespear Shakespear

e e e e e e
+ biography + site:edu + site:org +biography +biography
+site:edu +site:org
Kiddle 44,100,000 32,500,000 642,000 6,830,000 6 374,000
Sweet 44,800,000 34,200,000 762,000 6,570,000 84,500 390,000
Search
Google 261,000,000 126,000,000 2,010,000 29,000,000 185,000 994,000
Bing 31,200,000 42,200,000 4,520,000 13,500,000 1,880,000 5,530,000

The most surprising figure that I uncovered was how small a pool of results was obtained

via Kiddle with the terms Shakespeare and biography, limited to .edu sites. Almost all the results
were not directly relevant, with the first hit being an article about the European Starling, after

three sponsored ads: for “Shakespeare Uncovered,” a series on PBS, a biography writing service,

and a list of hotels near Shakespeare’s birthplace. Google also had an advertisement listed first,

though a slightly more relevant one for travel in Stratford-on-Avon with links to pages on

Shakespeare’s life. Since Kiddle is supposed to be kid-friendly, I found it irksome that

sponsored content was the first listed, though I also note that it is “powered by Google,” which

may explain it. This tells me that teachers must be proactive about teaching students to avoid

“sponsored” links that compete for attention on the top of the page. Google’s sponsored content

is able to be discerned only by a small icon in front of the web address; Kiddle’s is blocked off in

a gray box. Neither SweetSearch nor Bing displayed any visible ads competing with the search

results.

Another takeaway from these numbers is that the vast majority of search results are in the

.com domains, which are just the most common ones. Sites with .edu are restricted to U.S.

educational institutions, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that this category returned the smallest

number of results in each engine. Shakespeare was a British writer and British educational

institutions use .ac.uk as their domain, while other countries also use .ac with an abbreviation

appropriate to their countries. However, many countries also use a different main domain

(instead of .com) such as .uk, .ca, .fr, and that did not stop .com addresses from predominating on

every engine.

Every engine returned the same first result from Shakespeare + Biography: the Bard’s

page on biography.com. SweetSearch, Google, and Bing all returned Folger Shakespeare

Library (a recognized authority on the writer) within the top six, with SweetSearch and Bing

making it number three. Kiddle, instead, put three kid-specific sites about Shakespeare in the top
six and did not mention Folger. The second and third pages of Kiddle results listed some famous

actors in movie versions of Shakespeare.

Another observation that I made was that Kiddle and SweetSearch filtered out Wikipedia

entries. Google and Bing both feature Wikipedia content prominently in a sidebar. If students

plan to use Google or Bing, it’s important to inform them of the appropriate use of Wikipedia:

fine for general information or to get a sense of a topic (as Wikipedia itself states), but

unacceptable in most academic contexts as a cited source, due to its constantly changing content

and uncertain authorship.

My conclusion is that Kiddle may be good for very small children because it filters

strenuously, but I would not recommend it for high-schoolers. Bing and SweetSearch were

particularly nice for the lack of advertising, and Bing even beat Google for pulling from .edu and

.org sites. Google’s site numbers for the broad search terms were impressive, but did not fare as

well when narrowed as did Bing’s results, which tells me that there may have been a great

number of tangential or irrelevant results. My inclination would be to use Bing when possible,

or SweetSearch for kids when there might exist a worry about inappropriate results coming up.

No matter what engine is used, however, students must be armed with the tools

necessary to evaluate sources once they pop up, to find the most relevant source, and to avoid

ads, joke sites, or untrustworthy sources. Even the best search engine filter is no substitute for

careful human scrutiny.