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"Curation is a crawling problem, not a filtering problem" reframes the whole category. Filtering inherits whatever the parent index already decided existed, so you spend forever arguing with someone else's map of the web.
The part I would find hardest is that a small index fails differently for kids than for adults. An adult reads an empty result as the index not having it. A child reads it as the thing being broken, and there is no obvious way to say "we have not crawled that yet" that lands at eight years old.
That second paragraph is the sharper point, and it's one I hadn't fully sat with until you said it. An empty result on a general-purpose search engine reads as "not in the index yet" because everyone's implicitly aware indexes are incomplete. A kid doesn't have that mental model — an empty result just reads as "broken" or "doesn't exist," and there's no good way to explain "we haven't crawled that yet" to an eight-year-old without it sounding like an excuse.
Took it as a direct prompt to go fix the actual empty-state on kids.findnix.eu — it was saying "No results found, try different search terms," which is exactly the adult-index framing you're describing. Changed it to frame the mascots as still looking ("Uli and Nele haven't found anything for that yet!") and paired it with a direct link to suggest the page, so a dead end turns into an action instead of a wall. Small copy change, but your comment is the reason it happened today rather than never. Thanks for that.