by Sergio Duarte Torres, Djoerd Hiemstra and Pavel Serdyukov. 

The majority of children and teenagers are active users of the Internet for education and entertainment purposes, thus developing children’s abilities to find and understand information is a key in their development as young adults. However, children’sability to use the Internet is severely hampered by the lack of appropriate search tools. Most Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed for adults: they return information in a form that is unsuitable for children.The aim of this presentation is twofold: (i) introduce the research lines and outcome of the PuppyIR project which is aimed at providing a infrastructure and framework for developing child-focused information service; and (ii) explore the outcome of our research on understanding the search behavior of children in the Internet and provide a brief description of query recommendation mechanisms tailored at young users. Read the paper.