Filed under: Fun, Internet, Kids, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Freeware
Quintura for Kids - searching made easier
by Jason Clarke Feb 25th 2007
Learning to search the web can be frustrating for children. One simple spelling mistake is all it takes to make a search query useless. Plus, most search engines don't help the user find related information, so they cannot quickly and easily hone their search to find exactly what they're looking for. Quintura is a search engine that we have discussed previously here, and here. Most recently, they've introduced a beta product called Quintura for Kids, which aims to make searching easier for children. It sports a friendly theme and a few baked-in kid-friendly default searches. Otherwise, in terms of functionality it is very similar to the standard version of Quintura.
In my mind if you're going to market a product to children, it's pretty important to include content safeguards. For example, Google has a setting called "family filter" that attempts to protect young eyes from the impurities of the internet. In Quintura for Kids, I tried a search for the word "Sex", and the related words the search returned included "nudity" and "violence". That made me nervous, but it turned out that the search results shown were heavily filtered and nothing offensive was visible. Kudos! More kid-friendly searches like "Train" or "car" returned tons of interesting options, while interestingly zero results were returned for "nude" and for "Google". The Google one cracked me up.
Hopefully Quintura for Kids will soon be brought out of beta, and have the theme updated, as the holiday theme is maybe a little out of date.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
