The way people seek, access, and use information for learning has changed. Once the primary gateway to information, search engines now share the stage with various digital/social platforms. This change is perhaps more notable among teenagers and has undoubtedly influenced how they browse and select resources to support their learning. To understand their habits and how alternatives to search engines have influenced them, in this work, we explore how high school students conduct online inquiries in the classroom. Our findings reveal that search engines are not always students’ first choice; social networks often play a leading role. This shift has important implications for the design of information retrieval technology, as researchers should consider how teenagers—an understudied population—use this range of tools. In addition, it is critical to foster search and media literacy skills among young users, who increasingly turn to tools not designed to search for information for educational purposes.

There is a lack of a steady and solid influx of information retrieval (IR) research that has children (as the user group) as the protagonist. Existing work is scattered, conducted by only a few research groups, and often based on small-scale user studies or data that cannot be widely shared. Moreover, much of the current research focuses on specific age ranges and abilities, neglecting the broader spectrum of children's needs. Consequently, the paucity of IR research on how search and recommender systems serve and/or ultimately affect children translates into one of many 'Low-resource environments' in IR. Drawing from the literature and our experience in this area, we highlight key challenges and encourage greater attention from the IR community to address this critical gap.