Information search for children using Faceted navigation

Information search is one of the most common activities over Internet. Several search engines crawl the web round the clock and fetch useful information according to users' interest. To date, most of these search engines exploit the keyword based searching procedure which might be inappropriate for some naive users such as children. It may be very intricate for children to search their desired content effectively using the traditional `keyword based' search mechanism. They may fail to map the desired concept into appropriate keywords. To circumvent this situation, Faceted navigation is proposed as an effective alternate search method for children. Faceted navigation, also termed as Faceted search, is a specialized form of exploratory search that allows the users to search a domain on the basis of its attributes. We have performed several experiments to compare faceted search to the traditional query-based search mechanism. In particular, a faceted search based test interface has been designed. Children were asked to perform some pre-designated tasks on this system and their performance was analyzed on the said faceted search interface. A quantitative comparison was made with a query based search system using few quantitative performance metrics: keyword and spelling mistakes, number of missed pages and average accuracy. It is evident from experimental results that children performed much better on the proposed faceted search interface than query based search system.