Security company Symantec has released an interesting
top of the 100 most popular searches kids do online. The top three results are YouTube, Google and Facebook, some of the largest sites online. While many of the entries aren't that surprising, several trends emerge from the list, like the fact that searching has mostly replaced typing URLs directly in the address bar.
Among the top 10 searches are some of the biggest and most popular sites like search engines Google and Yahoo, coming in at two and seven, and the two largest social networks Facebook and MySpace at three and five, respectively. Apparently, the auction site eBay is also very popular among the younger users, coming in at number 10. The top is based on searches between February and July this year but Michael Jackson still managed to get so much attention this past month that he reached the 8th spot, followed by the fictional YouTube character Fred, which is very popular with the kids. And, of course, the top ten is round up by two searches of a more “adult” nature coming in at number four and six.
The top goes on with big sites, products and celebrities popular with the kids and, yes, even more “naughty” searches. While the list is interesting on itself the trends that can be extracted from the searches are even more important and one thing that stands out is the fact that most of the searches are, in fact, for sites that have exactly the same URL as their names, like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc. And if you think that's strange, consider the fact that Google, the biggest search engine so the site where most of the searches in the top have been performed, came in at number 2, basically meaning that kids are searching for Google on Google.
Even if you discount the searches made on other engines, many applications change the default search engine in browsers and no company is too small or too big for this type of irritating behavior, from Yahoo to Ask.com to a number of much shadier sites, and even if you consider that the searches may have originally come from the search bar all modern browsers incorporate that still can't account for all of the cases.
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