Kid-friendly search engines

I've been waiting for this: the specialists at SearchEngineWatch updating their survey of child-safe search engines. The article covers major directories of child-appropriate Web sites, grownup search engines that provide filtering, and a bit about filtering software in general. One children's directory they missed is Kidsnet's Hazoo.com, which offers only child=safe Web pages actually reviewed by human beings (Kidsnet's number was 175 million pages a year ago). For more on Kidsnet filtering, see my write-up, 4/9/04. Parents, you do know about filtered Web search, right? If you don't have filtering for your family PC, this would be the most basic precaution against kids stumbling upon online porn: Go to Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, etc. and turn on strict filtering on their preferences pages. A family rule to use only those filtered search engines (to keep it simple at our house, we all just use one search engine) and not to change the preferences would back that up. As an additional precaution, we tell our kids to use that search engine to find sites whose URLs they're not sure about - don't just type any old URL into your browser windeow, because of the bad stuff you can run into. [Thanks to Marylaine Block's "Neat New Stuff I Found This Week" for pointing out the SearchEngineWatch update.]