AOL partners with Blinkx for K-12 search engine

AOL LLC is hoping to attract schoolchildren and their parents to a new search engine designed to be a tool for helping with homework.

StudyBuddy.com, officially launched on Wednesday, contains about 1 million preselected links to Web pages considered to have educational value from a wide variety of sources.

Search results include encyclopedia entries, newspaper articles, book content, audio and video clips, photos and maps and regular Web pages.

Students can narrow the list of results by specifying they want to only see those appropriate for a specific grade level: kindergarten through second grade; third to fifth grade; sixth through eighth grade; and high school.

The site also offers students online folders it calls "backpacks" where students store information and share it with others.

The announcement comes as students in the U.S. are getting ready to start a new school year. In a study published in August of last year, The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that 87 percent of youths between the ages of 12 and 17 in the U.S. use the Internet. More than 80 percent of teenagers and their parents believe the Internet helps teenagers do better in school, the study found.

AOL partnered with Blinkx to power the search functionality on the site, primarily because of Blinkx's strength in multimedia search. For Blinkx, a privately held search engine operator with 30 employees, this represents its most important licensing deal of its technology, said Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx's founder and chief technology officer.