Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Parental Control through Google

Came across Google's SafeSearch preference setting while searching for parental control tools and techniques. Works quite well! Here is an example: Search results for 'whitehouse' with 'moderate filtering' returned around 1,250,000 entries with whitehouse.com, a known porn site, being the second entry. The same search query with 'strict filtering' returned only around 600,000 entries, and whitehouse.com was not there.

This appears to be a reasonable first line of defence for my 7 year old daughter against accidental wandering off in the cyber-space. Of course, this is pretty lame for someone more knowledgeable:

• One can simply change the preference setting, for there is no access control over who can change the preferences


• One can simply get an unsafe URL in a SPAM


• One can stumble upon an unsafe URL in normal course of web-browsing


• One could get such a URL from a friend

So, in near future, I plan to investigate some of the parental control software available in the market for their effectiveness. Will publish my findings here.