Elementary and middle school students need to use search engines that produce a more limited number of good, useful sites that are at the student's reading level. The sites also need to have safe content. Yahoo and Google are much too large search engines to be used by children. There are a number of excellent kid friendly search engines .

The first service is Nettrekker, www.nettrekker.com

It is a subscription search service whose sites have been prescreened and rated by educators. It has three levels--elementary, middle school and high school. There is an image search, a person search, timeline and links to many reference tools.

AOL for Kids, www.kol.com

is a great search engine that produces a manageable number of sites that are at elementary and middle school interest and reading level.

Try www.askforkids.com   This used to be called "Ask Jeeves for kids".

Don't want all the garbage that Google picks up? Try Google safe at www.squrrelnet.com/search?Google_SafeSearch.asp  It will filter out the "bad and ugly" and still find lots of results.

Kidsclick is a search engine that has sites that are screened by librarians. You can find it at www.kidsclick.com