Comments on: Google's chastity belt too tight

Despite claims of "advanced proprietary technology," the search giant's opt-in porn filter proves no better than the primitive tools of the last decade, blocking many harmless sites, a CNET News.com investigation shows.

tatugirls.com

SafeSearch "led astray" by filtering out tatugirls.com?!!!!
Helllllllo??!!! Yeah, they're sooooo sweet and innocent in their
"Russian band" schoolgirl outfits, and won't have ANY influence
on my grade-school kids!

Apparently nobody at CNET watches MTV... this was NOT the
strongest example to use to make the point!

[TV James]

Yeah...

Yeah, I laughed at that one, too.

If the almighty PageRank is based on how many other sites link to a site, why can't it be used to help better filter? If all the sites pointing to a site aren't questionable, then maybe the site that's been redflagged might not be questionable?

Still not a perfect solution (especially if a bunch of teenage boys link to the tatu site), but it might be somewhat more intuitive.

babysitter

you shouldn't use the computer as a babysitter, and it's not the software's job to screen what your child sees - it's yours. take responsibility for your kids instead of leaving it to some flawed filter software.

[Acidf3d]

rationality

The point is that there is nothing pornographic about the Tatu website, it is a site dedicated to the band, and your thoughts on whether or not it is appropriate for young girls to use sex appeal in their film clips, are irrelevant. Filters are not intended to block legitimate content.

[phasam]

This is not a drawback

I welcome a completely clean opt-in search. If anything, Google should offer an additional safesearch for those worried they will miss out on some results, but don't mind some level of objectionable material slipping through.

[R_Harvey]

Even Google's normal (default) filtering is too restrictive

You never know what you're missing until you click 'Preferences / Do not filter my search results.' Unfortunately for people like me who dump their 'cookies' every time their browser closes, my search results are all too frequently truncated unless I remember to reset Preferences *every* time.

Can anyone recommend a *good* search site?

And, yes, I snickered at the reference to Tatu (in this context) too . . .

"sex" is now unblocked by SafeSearch

Same with "at ALittleGirlsBoutique.com". Does it mean that Google people are particularly quick on the uptake or that Mr McCullagh's research was dated when his article on SafeSearch came out yesterday?

As to the "Scunthorpe incident", Scunthorpe people seem to have found ways round to the blocking of the town's name in URLs: the two "blocked" sites mentioned in the article can be reached by an extra-click in pages that don't have the town's name in their URLs: for instance, http://www.rhatcliffe.freeserve.co.uk/scun_cats_page.htm is unblocked and has a link to http://www.scunthorpedistrictcatsprotection.co.uk/. Was the former created to counter SafeSearch's blocking of the latter, or because the town's name got blocked in general by filters? It would have been interesting to know, but there is no info on this in Mr McCullagh's article.

Another puzzling thing: at the end of his "chastity belt" article, Mr McCullagh gives a link to his own article on Ben Edelman's empirical analysis of SafeSearch (1), but that's all. It would have been great if Mr McCullagh's article had contributed to the further research suggested in the conclusions of Ben Edelman's Empirical Analysis. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

(1) http://news.com.com/2100-1032-996417.html For Edelman's research itself: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/google-safesearch.

Cordially

Claude Almansi
http://www.adisi.ch

[neptolac]

Moderate SafeSearch ON by default!

When you go to Google, hit Preferences. You will notice a little boxed-in area with the filter selections - the so-called "moderate" SafeSearch is on. If you go to modify (turn off or turn up) the filter, it creates a cookie on your system which can be deleted if you clear out your temp files. Unfortunately, what Google doesn't realize, is that this type of unannounced cookie is illegal in some states (such as Tennessee.) They need to post that their site will create a cookie so that they don't get into any legal trouble. They also need to have the filtering options on the main search page so that you don't have to look at the extremely tiny print to the right of the search bar to see "Preferences."

[George Cole]

unannounced cookie is illegal

http://www.analogstereo.com/gmc_safari_owners_manual.htm

[Acidf3d]

simple suggestion

I am no expert when it comes to search engines or how they function, but surely the filtering tool could be modified to check everytime it finds a keyword such as sex that there aren't two common english words linged together. For example, couldn't SafeSearch once it finds the string RomansInSussex, simply search backwards until it finds the U, then the S, and once it has identified Sussex, then abort the block? Would this take up too much of the system resources?

[lysglimt]

Google SafeSearch family friendly and safe search engine

An interesting knock off from Google is the EnterSearchTerm.org search engine that only gives you Google SafeSearch results.

http://www.entersearchterm.org

Google SafeSearch family friendly and safe search engine

http://www.entersearchterm.org does not seem be working. Another alternative that returns filtered results is http://www.googlesafe.com

You have misinterpreted some of the data

SafeSearch is not blocking ALittleGirlsBoutique.com at all. Pages from that site come up if you search for content from it. However, the results indicate that not all the pages have been crawled. Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, has reported on his blog that SafeSearch won't return listings for uncrawled pages.

Many site operators who feel their sites are being blocked by SafeSearch may only not have been crawled when the current index was built. It may only require that they get a few more links to their sites to ensure that Google crawls them. They should also make sure their internal linkage is set up correctly (including the use of HTML site maps if they have more than a few pages).

[George Cole]

uncrawled pages

http://www.analogstereo.com/rover_75_owners_manual.htm

[Bendinae]

Every few weeks I have to reset my safesearch preferences to "do not filter" status.

My cookies are fine, I've checked.

Does Google reset peoples' preferences periodically? Has anyone else had this problem?

Just curious.