Something my wife told me

Google vs Ask Jeeves and the kids.

[Powdork]

She teaches msoffice and other computer related stuff to high school kids. Recently, one of the homework problems involved using the internet for a list of searches. They had to list how they got to their answers. Google was out and out the favorite. She was surprised that almost all the non Google answers came from Ask Jeeves. She didn't have all the papers with her so I don't have the statistics. I told her I would also like to know which engines produced the most correct answers. One possibly important note is that many of the questions were of the 'how do you?' type. I realize that the sample size of 30 (that are related by geography and other factors) users is ridiculously small. Does anyone else see a trend of young people towards Ask Jeeves, or of young people knowing or thinking Ask Jeeves is designed for this?

[IanTurner]

Ask Jeeves for Kids - directly targeted at kids, as someone said, 'Give me a child before the age of 7 and they are mine for life'

[sem4u]

The kids may have seen the butler on TV ads and thought that Ask Jeeves was a good place to search.

Was there any mention of Yahooligans?

[Powdork]

No, but I'll get more info, assuming we start speaking again soon.:(

[sem4u]

I think the key point here is in the way the questions were constructed. 'How do you?' type questions are well suited to how Ask Jeeves has been marketed with the supposed question format searching.

[Hawkgirl]

Maybe they had a computer class in which a teacher gave them pointers to do research on the Internet ... and that's how they knew to go to Jeeves with their "questions."

(Just a guess. I feel like going to Jeeves and typing, "How did the kids know to use AskJeeves instead of Google?" But I won't.)

[dragonlady7]

>assuming we start speaking again soon

uh-oh, that doesn't sound good. best of luck with that.

[sidyadav]

But when I heard the name "AskJeeves" I thought, the search engine was made for questions, I mean Ask-Jeeves, Where you can ask a question to Jeeves-the-butler so I tried a few queries and hey, wow, It doesn't give much info about the pages such as 'Cached' etc. but still its good for asking it questions.

Once I remember I was playing 'Who wants to be a millionaire', a Macromedia Flash Computer Game Simulator thing (Doesn't give you money though :( but anyway, as I was playing, I was kinda cheeting, I tried questions on Google got some extra un-wanted results, tried them on AskJeeves, and hey, the answer was in the snippet! Still Jeeves in pretty good at answering questions but not that good in different kinda things.

Sid