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Google SafeSearch Goes Too Far
Posted by Paul Szynol on Thursday, April 10 @ 18:04:49 EDT
Contributed by BenEdelman
News
BenEdelman writes "In 2000, Google introduced a feature called SafeSearch, intended to omit from Google's results sites with "pornography and explicit sexual content." My prior research as to filtering systems suggests that all filtering systems block considerably more content than their stated rules suggest, and with that in mind I set out to evaluate SafeSearch's accuracy. My full report is now available:
"Empirical Analysis of Google SafeSearch".

My research indicates that Google omits at least tens of thousands of web pages without any sexually-explicit content, whether graphical or textual. SafeSearch is easily confused by ambiguous words in web page titles -- like "Hardcore Visual Basic Programming," a web page that describes intense programming for experts, without any sexually-explicit content whatsoever. SafeSearch also makes mistakes that are harder to understand -- like filtering the National Middle School Association (nmsa.org) and even the front page of Northeastern University (neu.edu), not to mention numerous sites operated by US federal, state, and local governments. Among searches on subjects such as reproductive health, SafeSearch allows some results but not others in a way that seems essentially random; it is difficult to construct a rational non-arbitrary basis for which pages are allowed and which are blocked. See highlights of pages omitted from SafeSearch seemingly inconsistent with SafeSearch's stated filtering policy.

In addition to providing a listing of specific URLs excluded from Google SafeSearch, I have provided a testing system to let users quickly determine whether a given URL is excluded from SafeSearch, and to determine, for a given keyword search, which ordinary Google results are excluded by SafeSearch.

Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
"

 
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Re: Google SafeSearch Goes Too Far (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Friday, April 11 @ 16:21:11 EDT
Sometimes two searches on Google made at different
times with the same keywords returns different results.
I suspect that this is due to not all of the webservers
being in sync all of the time. I wonder if anything was
done to help adjust for that possibility in this study?


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Google SafeSearch Goes Too Far (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Saturday, April 12 @ 14:15:01 EDT
Google can not know the content of an image. There are many of the most hard core adult sites out there that zero text on the page. How is Google suppose to know to filter out that page? It can not do that without a team of editors. Like many search engines, it relies on 3rd party data. As those guys said in reply over on WebmasterWorld, "If a choice has to made between pleasing Harvard Law School or a Dad surfing with his 5 year old daughter, I would strongly recommend siding with Dad!"


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Misplaced Indignation (Score: 1)
by MurphysLaw on Saturday, April 12 @ 21:57:26 EDT
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Google SafeSearch is a optional service. As such, I hope that it would err on the side of dropping content which is not objectionable to including content which is objectionable. We have to distinguish optional services like this from mandatory filtering like that used by libraries.

The problem of distinguishing "safe" content from "unsafe" content is an inherently difficult one. Some people seem to be satisfied with nothing less than perfect performance by such tools. Their expectations are highly unrealistic.

As a parent, I would rather have to option of using a service such as this when I go online with my daughter. I agree that filters are no substitute for parental involvement, but I applaud Google for attempting such a difficult problem and giving me the option to use it or not to use it.


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