Search engines are powerful tools for finding information, but without a little bit of care, you or your family may have objectionable, inappropriate, pornographic, or even sexually explicit material suddenly splashed on your monitor. Search engines rely on the user to supply one or more keywords or key phrases in order to find specific online resources. In general, the fewer keywords or key phrases that you use, the more general the result. All of the major search engines have filtering options that give you the choice of having either filtered or unfiltered results. If the search engine has no filtering, it will provide the most comprehensive results, but it may also allow results that you don't want to see.
What Single Word Searches May Turn Up
The most general kind of search is one that uses a single word. One word searches are usually not very useful because so many different kinds of online resources may include that one word. Unfortunately, some developers of sexually explicit online resources have become quite successful at designing their content so that single word searches using seemingly innocent words will give search results that will link you to one or more sexually oriented resources. This is particularly noticeable on searches for images. Google and other major search engines have an option to search specifically for images. The results page, instead of having mostly printed information, will have an image plus a link to the image or to the page containing the image. A single keyword search request could cause the search engine to return one or more adult oriented images.
Examples of Inappropriate One Word Search Results
For example, using the Google search engine, I chose the "Images" search option, and tried several dozen single word searches to see if the first page of results would contain one or more images that were either pornographic (sexually explicit or intended to cause sexual arousal) or inappropriate for children. After less than 30 minutes of effort, I found that the following words generated at least one pornographic, sexually explicit, or otherwise inappropriate image (test conducted on September 25, 2007):
aunt, banana, bath, boat, boy, candy, clean, closed, cousin, daughter, dirty, doctor, doggy, doll, eat, family, girl, grandma, man, meat, milk, mother, nurse, photo, picture, play, ride, sister, sleep, vegetable, wash, woman
The Major Search Engines and the Simpsons Test
One of the fears that parents have of the Internet is that their children may be exposed to sexually explicit material. One reasonable scenario that may happen is something I'd like to call the "Simpsons Test." Imagine that a child who is a fan of the Simpsons decides to do a search for some online pictures of their favorite characters. What would happen if the only term that child used was the first name of that character?
On November 7, 2007, I put the search engines of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Live Search to this test. I chose these three because most online searches use one of these three search engines (an August 2007 study by Nielsen/NetRatings showed that these three search engines accounted for about 86% of all search queries). For each search engine, I turned off all filtering, and performed an image search for the following names: Simpsons, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Marge, and Homer. A search engine would fail my Simpsons Test if the first page of results contained at least one pornographic image. All three search engines failed for the names Simpsons, Lisa, Marge, and Maggie. Bart and Homer fared better, with Homer only failing on MSN Live Search, but Bart failing on both Yahoo! and MSN Live Search.
The most disturbing finding of my test was that some of these pornographic images were cartoon depictions of one or more Simpsons characters engaged in explicit sexual activity. Although these kinds of images would be shocking to most children and adults, they are not illegal in the U.S.
What You Can Do to Protect Your Family
Any search, no matter how well constructed, may generate inappropriate results. However, doing the following will be very effective at keeping you and your child away from most pornography and other objectionable content:
* Always use two or more keywords or key phrases in any search.
* Set up your favorite search engines to filter search results.
* Supervise your child when he or she is learning how to use a search engine.
* If your child is allowed to go online alone, make sure he or she knows how to properly use a search engine.
* Make sure your child understands what is acceptable online behavior.
Other Resources
The book Parenting and the Internet (Speedbrake Publishing, 2007) by Todd Curtis has more detailed information about online privacy and security, with advice on how to keep your child from being exposed to online pornography. Visit http://speedbrake.com for more information about the book.
About the Author: Dr. Todd Curtis is the creator of the web's most popular airline safety site AirSafe.com (http://www.airsafe.com), the director of the AirSafe.com Foundation, and an expert in the areas of engineering risk assessment and risk management. He has applied those basic principles to the problem of managing Internet use, and has put many of those insights and lessons learned into his book Parenting and the Internet (Speedbrake Publishing, 2007), an easy to understand how-to guide that parents can use to manage the activities of their online children. For more information about the book and how it can help you, visit http://books.speedbrake.com
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