dragonlady7 - 6:00 pm on Jun 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

What I found most interesting was the variety of factors Google uses to exclude things under SafeSearch.
Not just sexually explicit content, but also if they haven't been able to cache the page.
Huh?
Exactly. It seems almost entirely random to me. I guess they're playing it safe, in that they don't want pages they can't spider showing up, as they have no way of knowing whether their content has changed.
But some of the URLs that showed up there boggled my mind. Why on earth would NASA's space shuttle page be filtered?

But I'm not really sure how I feel about this issue. I mean... I don't have kids, or anyone I need to prevent from seeing the Internet in all its glory and sleaze. If I did, I don't know how I'd feel, letting them go online.
I want to just say "you should watch your damn kids" but I know that's not possible. You can't sit there while they play online for hours.
I'm not sure how my parents would have handled it with me, either. I was 14 or so by the time we got Internet access. I did whatever I liked. I didn't look for porn because it didn't occur to me. And I knew my parents could walk by at any time and see what I was doing.
I think that right there is the rub. Nothing can beat a supervisor of some kind simply walking past the computer. That, not censorship, is the way to go. We can't hold Google responsible for what's on the Internet, and asking them to fudge results is neither correct nor fair. Kids need to learn to look away. You click on something, it's not what you thought it was, you click the back button and go scrub your eyeballs with brillo pads to get the horrifying pictures out of your mind, just like the rest of us. Right?

Of course that'll never happen. I think the approach the author advances, that of pointing out when a site has been omitted, is probably the best. As long as you know your results are filtered, and what's being filtered out of them, you'll sidestep a lot of the issues presented there.
And that also goes a ways towards making users aware that Google is not The Internet. I understand, it's good for their image to appear omniscient and authoritative, but they're not, and that causes a lot of problems (or so a lot of journalists and forum-watchers would have you believe). Simply pointing out that their index does not contain the entire Internet, but rather an impressive portion thereof, might help that...
I certainly understand, however, that the next step, that of emailing everyone excluded from the index or from the SafeSearch index, is asking too much of Google. Out of 4 billion pages (is that the # now?) they cannot possibly spare a human to email the owner of every one that is excluded. It just seems overwhelming.

Oops, back to work for me. Enough pontification about Google.