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November 24, 2006

Yahoo Image Search Bug Showed Sex Images For Innocent Search

Yesterday, on Thanksgiving, The Register reported that a search at Yahoo Images for franchise returned very offensive and disturbing images. I will not describe the images, but I saw them myself and as soon as I saw it, I emailed my contacts at Yahoo. Soon after the images were pulled from the search results. It seems to me that someone figured out a way to easily insert pornographic images into Yahoo images for a search term even with safe search on. The Register has blurred and censored screen captures of the first line of results.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:47 AM | Permalink

November 14, 2006

InfoSpace Launches Kid-Friendly Search Engine Zoo.com

InfoSpace has launched kid-friendly search engine Zoo.com, which provides web and news search. Intentionally there is no image search at launch. The content comes from Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia with news content from ABC News, Fox News and Yahoo News. Zoo.com uses several methods to screen out adult sites and phrases and doesn't generate results for some queries. For example, a search for "sex" yields zero results.

InfoSpace said it developed the Safari-themed site after conducting considerable research and user testing. Zoo.com is aimed at "tweens" (8 to 13 year olds) who, according to the company, who use the Internet extensively for homework. In research with kids, InfoSpace found that almost half of tweens rely on the Internet as their top information source vs. 29% who use libraries as their number one source.

Ironically, if you do a search for "Kid Friendly Search" on Google, the top sponsored link is for "Adult Friend Finder." Similarly if you conduct a search for pop-singer "Madonna" on Windows Live image search, you'll find what many parents might consider inappropriate content, including nudity and images from her "Sex" book. That's equally true on Yahoo image search. Accordingly, it's very easy for kids to stumble upon adult content without looking for it. And many parents either don't or don't know how to change the porn filters on search engines.

Zoo.com doesn't have any banner advertising but there are commercial links interwoven among the general, organic results. Rod Diefendorf, vice president of local and online search for InfoSpace, explained this approach by saying that paid search results are often equally if not more relevant than organic results, depending on the query.

Zoo.com "competitors" include Yahoo's Yahooligans, AOL's Studdy Buddy and Ask's Ask for Kids. There's also KidsClick!, which is by librarians.

Here's Danny's previous roundup of kid-oriented search engines and porn filtering. There are many more sites is his piece than I've covered above.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 8:33 AM | Permalink

September 11, 2006

Google's Toolbar Anti-Phishing Blacklist

Philipp Lenssen reports on a whitelist of URLs found at sb.google.com which appears to be a whitelist of safe URLs to be used for the Google Toolbar. Be digging deeper into the forums area of Google Blogoscoped, you can see that the this whitelist will prevent the "Web Forgery" warning in the Google Toolbar from popping up on those particular sites.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:25 AM | Permalink

August 24, 2006

Google Joins Coalitions To Fight Child Pornography

The Google blog announced that Google has joined two coalitions to help protect children online. These coalitions combat child pornography and child exploitation on the Internet. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) release can be found here.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:05 AM | Permalink

June 30, 2006

Ask.com Removes "Legacy Filters" To Enable Pedophilia Keyword Search

About a week ago we covered a story that Ask.com was blocking search terms such as laws against pedophilia and preventing child pornography, amongst others. Philipp notes that Ask.com has removed the "legacy filters" to enable those types of searches. In fact, for the search on preventing child pornography, you get a special "smart answer" for "Child Abuse Resources."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:19 AM | Permalink

June 27, 2006

Image Database To Fight Online Child Porn

The AP reports that AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink, NetZero and Juno are teaming up to fight child pornography. They are pooling together $1 million to build a database of pornographic images of children and software to match the image database with similar matches on their own networks. So Yahoo may scan email attachments, Yahoo Groups images and other places in the Yahoo network where images may be. If any of the images match an image in the database, it can be flagged and sent to the authorities. The exact details of the software and how it will be used have not yet been decided.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:47 AM | Permalink

June 23, 2006

Ask.com Too Strict With Child & Sex Keywords?

The Hammer of Trust writes that Ask.com is way too strict for searches on keywords about sex and children. For example, a search on Ask.com on [laws against pedophilia] brings back a message that reads, "This query does not comply with Ask.com Terms of Service." The "Go" button following the message links you to Ask.com Terms of Service. Other similar searches do the same thing, such as , talking to your children about sex, blocking porn from kids and warning your kids about sex offenders. I also tried searching on preventing child pornography and that also was blocked.

It is important to note that all these queries bring back results at both Google and Yahoo. Is Ask.com way too strict here? It appears that way. But is it better than being hit with a child pornography suit like Google was?

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:09 AM | Permalink

June 22, 2006

Video Search, Smut and Censorship

Earlier this week, ZDNet News published an article discussing the presence and availability of explicit content on video search sites like, YouTube, Yahoo Video and Google Video. "A weeklong review of some of the top user-generated video sites by CNET News.com unearthed scenes of beheadings, masturbation, bloody car accidents, bondage and sadomasochism," wrote the reporter, Greg Sandoval. He did say that this review found no child pornography.

There are a number of issues that the article directly and indirectly raises. (I spoke to Sandoval during his interview process.) Perhaps the primary issue for marketers and the video sites that want their ad dollars is a practical one. There has been considerable press and discussion about the reluctance of mainstream brands to associate themselves with user-generated video content that they can't control. And there have been celebrated cases, for example on MTV-owned iFilm, where "run of site" video ads for mainstream brands have appeared as pre-roll in front of adult content.

To attract more advertising and address this criticism and the hesitation from marketers, MySpace, for example, has recently created "safe content areas" ? safe for marketers that is ? where no questionable content appears. Companies are chomping at the bit to reach the massive MySpace audience but do not want their brands associated or juxtaposed with violent, pornographic or otherwise questionable content.

As of today, Google is testing advertising on premium video content but doesn't offer it where user-generated content is involved (to address this same issue).

It's not completely fair to lump all sites together. Not all video search sites have the same range and types of content and, again to be fair, on those video sites where adult content is available, it's typically behind a warning or "safe search" filter. But those filters can be easily changed. And, somewhat shockingly, violent content (e.g., beheadings) is not similarly gated.

Video sites need to determine whether and how to treat explicit or "over 18" content in terms of the advertiser proposition. But beyond this, there are practical "enforcement" issues as well. If you've many thousands of videos coming into your site on a daily basis, like YouTube, there's time and cost involved in mounting an effort to screen all those videos before they're posted. One approach would be to monitor the tags and flag those streams that indicated questionable content for later human editorial review.

The simple approach, of course, would be to simply ban all "non-family friendly" content and thus create a video site that was safe for advertisers and kids. But then there's that little thing called the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

All pornography is not illegal; child pornography is. Yet pornography is offensive to many people. However, the discussion of what constitutes "pornography" takes us down a complicated and winding path that invariably invokes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 1964 quote in Jacobellis v. Ohio about the difficulty of defining pornography in the abstract: "I know it when I see it."

As a parent I'm not eager for my two young daughters to discover explicit content online when they years from now simply, out of curiosity, start entering sexually oriented words in a search box or video site. (I did the quaint equivalent as a kid in middle school looking up "sex words" in the dictionary.) But as a former lawyer with sensitivity to the complexity of questions of censorship and free expression I recognize that there's a practical and philosophical quagmire for Google, Yahoo and others around whether to show adult and other non-mainstream content on video sites. It's somewhat analogous to the question of whether to go into China and participate in the censorship of websites.

If you start "banning videos" what do you allow and what do you omit? Do you allow violence but not sex ? I just as equally would like to protect my daughters from beheading scenes. Do you allow sexual content but not extreme violence? Beheading videos from Al Qaeda are arguably "news content." And if you permit nudity, where is the line?

Monitoring and making judgments about the content of videos is not unlike the challenge of monitoring trademark infringement within paid search advertising: difficult, time consuming and inherently flawed.

I'm not suggesting there is no line and no limits but Google, YouTube, AOL, Yahoo and others need to find that line carefully, balancing the competing interests (legal, philosophical, financial) that weigh on this cluster of issues. I certainly don't have the answer and right now, apparently, neither do they.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 7:28 PM | Permalink

May 19, 2006

Google In Trouble Over Porn Again; This Time In Korea

Vnunet.com reports that Google is in trouble with Korean government officials over exposing children to pornographic content in South Korea. It seems like since Google pulls a snippet of content from the page it indexes on the search results page, and since that content contains "obscene" language, Google itself is "showing search results that contain sex-related keywords." No word from Google on this as of yet. Yesterday we reported Google being in trouble with Brazil over child pornography allegations.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:01 AM | Permalink

June 28, 2005

Government Report Says MSN Search Adult Filter Most Effective

A new report from the Government Accountability Office says that the adult filter at MSN Search is more effective at blocking adult content than similar filters at Google and Yahoo.

From an Information Week article: MSN uses a filtering system similar to the one used by the peer-to-peer file-sharing program Kazaa, which identifies titles and metadata to effectively block pornographic and erotic images. Yahoo uses a system that requires users to designate specific words to be blocked, which GAO contends still lets porn sneak by. The GAO did not provide details on Google's filtering technology but said it was not as effective as MSN's system.

"When searching Google using a known search word, we were able to download 79 images, of which 11 were adult erotica," Linda Koontz, GAO director of information management issues, wrote in a 74-page report. "Similar to [peer-to-peer site] Morpheus' filter, Yahoo's filter was largely ineffective in blocking pornographic and erotic images."

Interested in reviewing the complete 74 page (PDF) GAO report? You can find a copy here. Highlights from the report (PDF) are also available.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:44 PM | Permalink

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