Kids & the new search engines

Great resource this week from the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg: a roundup review of the four new search tools out there - Google's as well as Clusty.com, Amazon's A9.com, and My Yahoo. (Even more next-gen search engines are mentioned in a Washington Post article today.)

A parent's caveat: Something Walt didn't mention (no space and his audience isn't just parents) is what kids can run into, especially in A9.com if left unfiltered: A9's search turns up images on the same page as text results. I tested it with the word "nude" and - right on the main results page - got at least a dozen full-body nude shots, some in sexually explicit poses. I then went to "Preferences" (upper-right-hand corner) and clicked on moderate filtering, then saved my Preferences. My next search for "nude" turned up no images at all (same for strict filtering, of course). The good news is, A9 defaults to "moderate filtering" until you've registered (though I doubt there are many barriers to kids registering; of course if they want images, they can always go to Google Images search). For details on the other search tools, pls click to the latest issue of my newsletter. For more on image-searching challenges, see "Kids checking out porn with image searches" and "Kids and Net porn - moms' accounts."