A Study to Show to What Extent New Zealand War History Web-pages Are Configured for Discovery by Child Researchers Using Internet-Wide Search Engines

Abstract

This research set out to examine to what extent New Zealand War History web-pages are configured for discovery by child researchers using internet-wide search engines. The research involved gathering the keywords and phrases children would use when undertaking five specified information searches, through the administration of a questionnaire. These terms were then analysed alongside twenty-five pre-selected New Zealand History web-pages, selected to be appropriate for the information searches. The following elements within the pages were analysed: title tag, Meta title tag, description tag and body text. The web-pages search engine rankings of the pages were then looked at when the phrases provided were used in the Google search engine. The research found that child researchers use a wide variety of search terms, and make many spelling errors and lack the knowledge to develop terms. The study highlighted an issue with the use of macrons on web-pages with the word Maori, and how this could affect search results. With the vast number of possible search statements that could be used by researchers, being able to cater for such a potential range of search statements is a near impossible task for web-page developers. At this current stage the web-pages studied are not configured for successful discovery by child researchers using internetwide search engines, and other pages are being more successful at being discovered.