According to research from Symantec, the most searched for phrase among children is ‘YouTube’, with ‘Google’ following a close second. The research was conducted over a long period of time, February 2008 until July 2009, and looked at just 3.5 million searches.
One of the most notable things about the findings are that children are searching for one word keyphrases, for websites that should be fairly easy to find. Searches for ‘Yahoo’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘MySpace’ all figured in the top 10. This is probably due to children knowing the website and simply entering the keyword into the address bar, resulting in a search.
It’s laziness more than anything else.
Marian Merritt, who works for Symantec, stated about their product and how it records searches:
Parents can stay in the loop on what their kids are doing online.
It also helps identify ‘teachable moments’ when parents should be talking with their kids about appropriate online behaviour and other issues in their kids’ online lives.
The keywords ‘sex’ and ‘porn’ also featured in the top 10 results, which Ms Merritt isn’t surprised about:
Any of us who have been teenagers are not surprised kids look for information about sex.
I think we have all gotten over our shock that the Internet has porn.
The top 10 searches performed by children are:
- YouTube
- Sex
- MySpace
- Porn
- Yahoo
- Michael Jackson
- Fred (YouTube star)
- eBay
