Googled from the start

My eldest daughter has just started using an iPad in school for some of the curriculum which is kind of mind blowing. When I was in primary school there was maybe one BBC micro for the school!

She’s got an iPad at home so is pretty proficient but until now we’d disabled Safari on it - there’s a lot of internet there and we just weren’t ready for her to get it all.

In school they’re using the internet quite a lot to find images and resources for lessons. The way they’re finding these images seems to be mostly through Google, as far as she’s told us.

When I setup Safari on her iPad I set the default search engine to Duck Duck Go, the same as I use on my own devices. Despite this she already has it in her head that she needs to use Google to find things on the internet. She may even think that Google is the internet! Or she might not think of the internet the way we do and to her it’s just another app…

What really caught me is that if school age kids are being ‘taught’ google at such a young age is there much hope for any of the non-mainstream, non-household name services stand a chance of getting adoption from the next generation? Should the alternatives also be mentioned? I guess the same also goes for the default search engine that’s used in browsers, something which recently came up in the Google antitrust lawsuit in the states.