Kids goo

» see kids.goo.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In July 2001 I was seventeen, on a 56k modem in Turkey, and pointed at search engines mostly to reach things nobody had filtered. キッズgoo opened on the 23rd of that month, built for Japanese children in the first years of elementary school, and its headline feature was the filter.

NTT Resonant ran it as the children's wing of goo, the portal it had been operating since 1997. The search box was goo's own index with two things bolted onto it. Anything obscene or violent was blocked before a child could reach it, and every kanji on the page came back with furigana attached, the small kana printed above a character to tell you how it is read.

The site around the search box carried study material and quizzes, plus a cast of mascots running through all of it: ぐっぴょん and ちょっぴ and シャモ and パリンちゃん and an おじいちゃん, with ミント and サクラ joining them in 2011. Search results in the genre sections came with thumbnails, on the reasonable theory that a seven-year-old picks a picture faster than a headline.

It ran for fifteen years and eight months. For a free children's portal hanging off a telco's search engine, that is a long time to keep paying the bill.

~ the dossier ~

~ furigana as a feature ~

The furigana pass is the part worth remembering, because it solves a problem the Japanese web has and most webs do not. A Japanese child learns kanji across nine years of schooling, at a set rate and in a set order. A seven-year-old can be entirely literate for their grade and still be locked out of an ordinary web page by characters that are simply not on the syllabus yet.

キッズgoo's answer was to rewrite the page on the way through. Every character above the reader's level arrived with its reading printed over it, which turned the open web into something a second-grader could work through unaided. The filter is what got written about. The ruby text was the harder piece of engineering.

~ the notice written twice ~

NTT Resonant closed it on Friday 31 March 2017, and the notice it left behind is the reason this one is worth writing down. The page was written twice, for two audiences, one above the other.

The top half is in hiragana and addressed to the children: thank you for always using キッズgoo, it has been going since 2001, and on the 31st of March it finished. Underneath sits a heading reading ＜大人の方へ＞, to the adults, and the same news in formal Japanese, where the reason is given as a review of how the service was being used and the apology is a deep one. The page then notes that a picture-book character the site had carried would still be available elsewhere.

kids.goo.ne.jp does not answer today. goo outlived its children's wing by another eight years and died on 25 November 2025, so the parent and the child are both in here now, filed separately, the small one first.

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