Information Retrieval for Young Users

This chapter introduces the fundamental concepts and approaches that are prerequisites for the work described in this thesis. In Section 2.1 an introduction to Information Retrieval (IR) is given by defining the research field and describing IR system architecture. Furthermore, this section provides explanation of relevance ranking and introduction to search user interfaces. An introduction to targeted search engines is given in Section 2.1.4. The main aspects of children’s development relevant to IR tasks are described in Section 2.2. In Section 2.3, basic user research methods and user evaluation types are briefly discussed.