During the last week of term I sent an email link for a Surveymonkey questionnaire I had created to all our Years 7-8 (11-12 year olds). I’m interested in finding out about visual search but began by asking which search engine students preferred to use. They were given a choice of answers of Google, Bing, Safari, Don’t Know, Don’t mind and Other (please say). 47 of 176 students participated and a staggering 92% preferred Google. There were 2 “Other” replies which turned out to be Google Chrome! As our school browser is IE8 with a default Bing setting this is quite suprising. Even more interesting is the fact that when asked to explain why they chose a particular search engine 37 of them bothered to answer and gave very coherent and specific reasons for their choice. I’ve made a wordle of their comments omitting the words “because”, “use” and the names of specific search engines.
The students gave marked emotional responses for their use of Google compared with other search engines. One stated “Bing annoys me” and another “Google Chrome is faster, wicked, better, legendary, amazing and spectacular”!
