Yahoo! Kids
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Yahoo! has revamped its games / entertainment / schoolwork portal for its youngest users. Now simply called Yahoo! Kids, the site is kid-safe and editorially supervised, a "walled garden" of content that draws on a database free of objectionable material.
The site features an array of games, which is invariably the main online entrée to the children's demographic (kids tend to search "kids" and "games" more than anything else). Yahoo!'s games here are always G-rated and age-appropriate, and come in a variety of categories. Many are tied to TV shows or movies popular with kids. Others include sports games, arcade games, and classic card, board, and tile games.
The site also features trailers from upcoming movies and dozens of popular music videos, two other popular features in the children's demographic. On the horoscopes page, "The Swami" acts as a magic 8-ball to divine a user's future. These sections are also carefully supervised for kid-safe content.
Much of the site is educational in design. Two examples are its animal and dinosaur directories. Each species entry is brief but thorough, and features photographs and illustrations that identify each animal.
There's also an "Ask Earl" Q & A interface where kids write in and get their questions answered (such as "Is it possible to stand right on the equator?", "How do glow worms light up?", and "What is a Romance language?"). Like much of the site, the "Ask Earl" answers are at once legitimately instructional and easy to follow, geared toward satisfying the curiosity of young enquirers.
The site also features encyclopedia and dictionary links, as well as the atlas-like resources of the World Factbook, a kid-friendly collection of maps, country profiles, flags, and facts from countries around the world.
The predecessor of Yahoo! Kids was "Yahooligans," one of the first – if not the very first – major kids portals on the Web, which got considerable press when it first launched because of its carefully guarded children's environment, with hand-selected content and databases.