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How Does It Work?
How Do Filtered Search Engines Work?
There are two different kinds of filtered search engines: those that were designed from the bottom up to be kid-friendly and those that filter search results from major regular search engines. A kid-friendly search engine has fewer sites, but starts with clean sites and is limited to clean sites. A filtered full-size search engine has more sites, but is more likely to allow a problem site to slip through.
In a real kid-friendly search engine people hand review each site, pic and resource to make sure that they are appropriate for kids. Nothing beats the parent and teacher reviewed sites.
Most of the largest search engines have a “clean site” search option now, which screens the sites for content appropriate for children and searches only those sites. They use technology to remove the problem sites from the normal search results. If they use filters and technology, sometimes bad sites get through, though.
How Do Search Engines Find Sites?
Each search engine works differently. Google uses a combination of: 1) matching your search terms against those terms and the order the terms are used on the site, 2) how often other people click on the link for that site when they are using the same search terms you did, and 3) how many sites on a topic link back to that site. They believe that what people click on and what links exist to that site from other sites are good indicators of what that site is really about, instead of relying on what the site owner is saying it is about.
Yahoo! is the home of Yahoo! Kids, as well as the popular search engine Yahoo.com. Until Google became the search leader, Yahoo! controlled most of the online searches.
Bing is Microsoft’s new search engine. It is becoming pretty popular and allows videos and other resources to appear on one page. You may want to try it out and see if you like it as well or even better than Google. A recent search for “Parry Aftab” showed 590,000 pages on Bing and only 127,000 on Google. The same search for videos of Parry came up with 89 on Bing and 107 on Google.
There are some search pages that allow you to search once on several major search engines. It’s often a good way to find an obscure fact or photo.
Smart Filtering = Safe Searching
Many of us have seen some pretty gross things while searching for something innocent online. How can we end up with more of what we are searching for and fewer not-so-nice sites?
You can almost always find the filtered options of any full-sized search engine by clicking on “advanced” or “search options” on the main search page. You can then select the level of filtering that works best for you. The most restrictive is almost always fine for whatever you need to find. You can start there and see how it works for you.