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Quintura for Kids will soon be brought out of beta, and have the theme updated, as the holiday theme is maybe a little out of date.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
