There’s no doubt that Google is good at what it does. It’s put information at the fingertips of countless people of all ages. And there’s no doubt that kids and families think Google when they’re seeking answers before just about anything else.

But Google has done surprisingly little to educate the next generation of information searchers. As a matter of fact, sometimes I think that Google would love it if kids stayed blissfully ignorant on the subject of how a query is searched. Except for all but a few of the most techno-curious, kids don’t really think very much about how Google works and why they get the results they do.

Until Google makes search education and special search features for kids parents are on their own. Here are some of things parents should be noticing:

Search. What happens when your 7-year-old searches for a daisy to illustrate her school report? Well, she’ll get images of Daisies, but many will be of the human variety. Every parent knows the dangers of searching for everyday terms like “cheerleaders,” “toys,” or “teens.” You’re bound to turn up some very inappropriate answers. Google has a safe search feature as one of its options, but few parents know the feature exists or where to find it. And there’s no way to give the parent any special control over these search result options.

Media Literacy. The web is a great place to get information; it’s an equally good place to become misinformed. One 16-year-old just told me how she messed up meiosis and mitosis in a science paper because it was messed up on Wikipedia.

Many schools and parents try to keep kids from doing too much research on the web. Many schools limit the number of citations that you can attribute to the web in your papers because they want students to get in the habit of using books, which they believe are more carefully vetted. But students need to learn to vet the web as well. They need to learn the difference between a bogus URL and a real one, between a .edu address that belongs to a freshman who earned a “D” on the paper versus the scholarly article of a Ph D. professor.

Time Management. Every parent knows that kids get lots of homework, but do they really get more homework than other generations of kids or are they simply inefficient about how they’re spending their homework time?

Some of the distractions come from working with text messages or TV or music on, but a lot of the blame goes to Internet wild goose chases and mindless browsing. You know how it goes: You start looking for one specific piece of information and then, before you realize it, you’ve chewed up hours reading esoterica on the web. There are many ways to help kids avoid this, including building a timekeeper into the browser window or creating a reminder if a child is clicking too much on Wikipedia.

Academic Search. Try this. Search for Ethan Allen. There’s a good chance that you’ve pulled up a lot of references to a furniture store, but that’s not the Ethan Allen that your kids had in mind. Chances are they wanted Ethan Allen the Revolutionary War hero. Google and other search engines have catered to commerce and the most popular searches. Chances are your kids aren’t looking for the most popular searches.

Google and others can help by teaching kids how to perform a better search more efficiently.

In the above example, if they’d searched for Ethan Allen, Revolutionary War, they would have gotten more accurate results. You would think that Google could come up with a way to cater to student searches in a better way. Parents and teachers should certainly teach media literacy classes, but there’s no reason why Google couldn’t flag certain URLs as questionable when someone requests the “the student version” of a Google search.

Meanwhile, parents can help kids by showing them how to do a more specific search. For example search for Arabian Nights, literature and you’ll avoid finding out about horses, movies, and TV. Kids should also be receiving pointers on how to tell whether or not a site is an authentic piece of work from a reliable source or an outright fake. Since parents and teachers aren’t always aware of how to do this best, there’s a lot riding on the search engines to pick up the gauntlet.

For those of you that are not aware, Google does offer a lovely service for the more brainiac scholars amongst us called Google Scholar. It’s an index of scholarly works.

Sometimes I think that the folks working at Google are so brainy and so intent on maximizing their company’s revenues that they forget there are young kids who like pressing keys, aren’t scholars, and don’t know beans about how the web works. Certainly Google is no worse (and is probably better) than many others out there, but if you’re going to be the 100-pound gorilla in the search world, then you’ve got to make sure that your future audience is ready to live in an information rich world.

For those who are curious about why a search turn up answers in the order it does, there’s a great primer on How Stuff Works.