This book focuses on a very important educational subject matter: the proper usage of search engines for children. In order to approach this, one has to study the behavior of children when querying a search engine and the selection process of which result to use. The author reports on her thesis research in this treatise and expands on it by citing the most current literature on the subject matter. She formulates criteria for the study and provides guidelines for creating an appropriate user interface for children. These are based on her own and prior user studies. A recommendation of the text is to incorporate more visual and multimedia aids into the search process, because children respond better to visual rather than language cues.

There are a number of particular challenges that children face when using a search engine. To properly study the matter, several user studies were conducted during the thesis research. The actual study documents (in German) are provided in Appendix A. These include an eye-tracking study, evaluation of the knowledge journey, voice-controlled searches, evolving user interfaces for searching, and visualization with (cartoon) characters. The outcomes of these studies enabled the author to propose solutions to various challenges that children face. As an example, children require emotional support and want to feel accomplished. User interfaces therefore should not add frustration to the process. The author recommends a guidance avatar that catches when an error is made, or no results are found, and will suggest to the child how to make the experience better. If facial recognition software could measure frustration by monitoring a child’s face, then the system could help the child even more.

Search engines should incorporate only simple mouse-pointing or button-clicking interactions because children have less fine motor skills. An excellent alternative to tactile approaches is a voice-controlled system. This would minimize the need for physical interactions. Of course, the argument can be made that these interactions are important for children to develop good motor skills later in life. Similarly, results should be sufficiently large so that the target texts can easily be clicked on. Literacy is defined as the ability to read and write in a language. These are both tasks that children concentrate on, and struggle with, during their elementary school years. Children tend to read slowly and are only beginning to learn to write sentences. Their limited vocabulary leads to spelling errors and difficulty in formulating a query. The author proposes a menu-driven querying aid with speaking components to suggest to the child various query possibilities.

The brain pathways are not as developed in children as they are in adults. Children interact with the world around them and understand concrete (tangible) nouns such as people, places, animals, and physical objects. Adults converse more abstractly about ideas, events, or conditions. Search engine support tools for children need to consider this when relating information to children. Because the multitude of results that a query can return may frustrate the child, search engines should help the child to make a proper document choice. Finally, to help the child to remember what results they obtained during a prior session, a memory recall feature should store a child’s interested results from a prior visit and recall them for the child at a later querying session.

The book is 300 pages long, consisting of five parts, 11 chapters, and two appendices. The index of figures and tables is five pages long. This gives a sense of the extensive research and effort that went into this text. The impressive list of 195 references assures the reader that this book is comprehensive; the cataloging of the author’s 15 prior publications and three published studies on the subject matter indicates that she is the right person for the job.