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Jun 13, 2006 9:27 am US/Central
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Finding Kid-Friendly Search Engines
by Terri Gruca
(WCCO)
Even the best children can stumble onto the worst of the Web.
"I'll just be searching for a project and there's stuff completely unrelated coming up," said DeLaSalle student Ellie Engelen.
"There seems to be like a lot of ads that pop up or sometimes you know inappropriate sites that might pop up," said Quentin Moore, a University of St. Thomas student.
Both Moore and Engelen have had it happen to them.
"It's really frustrating," said Engelen.
It can be even more frustrating for parents who try to do everything to keep their children safe.
"You don't choose to bring it into your home, but it's in your home," said Englen's mother Judy Blaseg.
"We have filters, but mostly we're the filters," she said. "And we consider it our responsibility to teach our children about the Internet."
In Blaseg's Minneapolis home, the only room where kids can use the Internet is in the kitchen -- under her watchful eyes.
"It kind of helps that we don't have computers in our rooms and stuff, so I mean they can pretty much see what we're doing," said Engelen.
If you don't have that option you do have more ways than ever to protect your kids. Dozens of search sites filter out pornography and other inappropriate content free.
Google has a
safe search option which filters out the filth, but you've got to enact it by going to the advanced search option.
Yahoo and
Ask Jeeves have created kid-friendly search sites, but you've got to be sure your kids know how to get there.
"We have an editorial team that looks at every site and determines whether it's appropriate content for kids ages 6 to 11," said Doug Leeds from AskForKids.com, the Ask Jeeves kid-friendly search site.
Some of these kid-friendly search sites don't filter out everything. It's why some parents are opting to use parental control software packages which start around $40. Some of these packages such as
Safeeyes.com and
Online Safety Shield also let parents track who their child may be chatting with and even where they're searching online.
Christine Willig, a mother of seven, started a paid search site called
netTrekker after discovering a simple search about toys could pull sexually-explicit content.
"Welcome to Babeland. How easy would it be for a child to do this? If I go to netTrekker home and I put in that same search, this time what I'm going to come up with is a lot of history of toys, where toys came from through the ages," said Willig.
NetTrekker uses specialty software and hundreds of volunteer teachers to ensure kids can search safely.
Whatever you choose, make sure you try the software out yourself to be sure you're happy with how much it filters.
(© MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)