Extending Safe Search Functionality for Identifying Child-Safe and Educational Web Resources

Safe search is a filtering strategy used by search engines for the purpose of preventing children from accessing web resources that either contain adult content (i.e., pornography and nudity) or promote violence (i.e., include hate-speech and offensive language). Unfortunately, safe search is not always the perfect deterrent: at times, pornographic and hate-based resources slip through the filter, whereas, other times, resources that may be relevant to a child’s educational search context are misconstrued as being inappropriate, and are therefore filtered. In this paper, we first examine the functionality of a number of existing safe search filters. Based on our findings, we present ongoing efforts to address some of the limitations with traditional safe search filtering strategies