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July 5, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for these first days of July:


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Family Tech: Child-friendly Web searching

This probably looks more like a back-to-school topic than a mid-summer one, but:

  1. We do have subscribers in the Southern Hemisphere :-)
  2. The need for children's safe, constructive Web searching does not go away when homework assignments do (are there young gear-heads, gamers, and Web window shoppers at your house too?)
  3. This week's topic is tied to some significant search-engine news.

First the news...


Ideas for children's safe searching

But since using most search engines is the way many kids stumble on inappropriate material on the Net, children (as well as parents) need to develop "search smarts." Here are some ideas to consider for constructive Web searching at home:

  1. Choose and bookmark a list of search engines for the children to use (see examples below). A mix of kids' search sites and regular ones that provide filtering will probably work best because no single search engine meets all researchers' needs.
  2. Establish rules that a) these are the only search engines they may use, which is why it helps to "bookmark" them (in the Netscape browser) or add them to your "Favorites" list (in Explorer); b) that kids notify grownups when they're going to do research on the Web; and c) that filtering may not be turned off in any search engine a child uses.
  3. Monitor kids' search-engine use, both to assure safe exploring and to be sure kids are finding reading-level appropriate material. "Monitoring" can mean searching right along with young children, just checking progress during middle schoolers' research, looking at teens' browser history after hours occasionally, or using monitoring software. We think it's good always to be up front with kids about monitoring.

Safe search tools: Child-specific and filtered grownup ones

Here are the non-child-specific search engines that can be configured to do quite a good job of excluding content inappropriate for kids:


Of the options designed just for kids (their numbers have dwindled since the dot-com meltdown), our Top 3 picks are:


What we've learned

  1. Getting focused. "Games," a popular topic for online kids (yielding nearly 1,400 results at Yahooligans! and more than 40 million at Google!), was a good test to see how the search sites help you narrow results down quickly. To do that, choose from the categories at the top of the results page. Google and Lycos are great for this: At Google (which helpfully ranks all search results by popularity), 40 million can quickly be boiled down to 157 "Kids and teens' games" and 157 "Online games." At the top of Lycos's first results page, it starts its list of 115 "popular" game sites its editors have reviewed, then it has the results from searching its whole database (2.4 million + game refs). Of course you'll find more educational games at the noncommercial sites (KidsClick!.org and AwesomeLibrary.org).
  2. Focus + safety. Searching with the word "sex" not only indicates how effective filtering is, it also shows how useful the results turned up at kids' search services will be to kids. The filtering at all the grownup search engines did a very good job, for example listing sites with sexuality research and information, sex-offender lists, guides to "safe, responsible sex," and the latest on the "Sex and the City" TV series (not really child-appropriate, but...). For kids studying human reproduction in Biology, the kids' search engines are definitely the way to go.
  3. School topics. Last fall some fourth-graders we know studied the endangered black-footed ferret for science and Native American tribes in social studies - great terms with which to test how effective the kids' search engines were for students. On ferrets, Yahooligans! and Ask Jeeves Kids were best, with four and five very useful results, respectively. For information on tribes, AwesomeLibrary turned up 26 results and even starred the most relevant one (we thought appropriately). AJKids, Yahooligans!, and KidsClick! were great in helping to focus this broad topic. In only one of its handful of results, AJKids helpfully named 50 tribes to choose from. KidsClick! only turned up four results, but all were useful and one was excellent. For age-appropriateness, AwesomeLibrary's Help page very helpfully tells you how to search by grade level (which works elsewhere, e.g. in Yahooligans! and KidsClick!.org). At AL, type "grade geometry" or "grade and math" in the search window.
  4. The more the merrier. 1) Different topics work best at different search engines - which is why we suggest bookmarking a number of them. Pure entertainment topics (e.g., boy bands, games, etc., work best at the commercial sites, such as Yahooligans!. More obscure entertainment topics like Spongebob Squarepants the cartoon character, though, did not fare well at the kids' search engines (go for comprehensive results at the grownups ones). 2) There's also the serendipity factor: A search for games at a more comprehensive grownup search engine turned up a four-year-old friend's new favorite game site: Boowakwala.com.
  5. Current events in any language. For news junkies of all ages, AlltheWeb.com is hands-down winner for breaking news results. A high-profile story like Worldcom will literally turn up thousands of articles from sources worldwide - from financial to local newspapers to lifestyle publications. AlltheWeb searches in 47 languages. Other search engines good for news are Excite News, and AltaVista News.
  6. Search ed: For a primer on Web research for kids and adults, check out WorldofSearching.org, a project of the Ramapo Catskill Library System (in New York State), the people who created the KidsClick! directory and search engine. Some of the links are dead, but the information itself is timeless.

Editor's note: Picking search engines is a very subjective business, of course, so tell us (via feedback@netfamilynews.org) your favorites - why you like them, or, even better how Web research goes at your house. We're especially interested in hearing from subscribers outside North America of their favorite search tools. (Please see "Family-friendly UK search engine" in our 5/31 issue about the BBC's new resource.)

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Web News Briefs

  1. Record companies to sue individuals?

    The major record labels are planning a shift in legal tactics - suing individual file-swappers. In their "hell-bent" bid to stop piracy on the Net, as CNET puts it the record companies are considering suing the 10% of file-sharers who are widely believed to be providing "90% of the content available" on file-sharing networks such as Kazaa." Those 10% are people who make the huge song collections on their hard drives available to other file-traders in these Net music communities. It's not probable but possible that some of them reside in the homes of members of this interest community - one more reminder that parents need to know what kids are up to online. The recording industry's many previous lawsuits - against the file-sharing services themselves - have had little effect on the volume of music file-trading, CNET adds. "According to recent estimates by The Yankee Group research firm, close to 7.9 billion audio files were traded in 2001 by computer users 14 years and older. By 2004, they expect that number to rise to more than 11.4 billion." Here's a Wired News analysis of this development.

    To further alienate music customers, it seems, the record labels are also planting music-file '"decoys" on the file-sharing services, Reuters reports (via the South China Morning Post). "Many large record labels have resorted to what is known as 'spoofing,' by hiring companies to distribute 'decoy' files that are empty or do not work in order to frustrate would-be downloaders of movies and music," Reuters explains.

  2. Beware worm disguised as music file - again

    Kazaa, the music file-sharing service, seems to be quite susceptible to e-viruses. The "Kowbot" worm is able to take control of a victim's computer, send information out from it, and update itself automatically, reports the UK's VNUNET. This is the second worm in as many months that has been found going around the Kazaa user community, which does not bode well for the safety of downloading music or any other kind of file in peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa, one of the most popular ones at the moment.

  3. Multinational police raid

    On one morning this week hundreds of police arrested suspected pedophiles in seven countries, an operation that the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit had been working on for a year, Ananova reports. "Experienced detectives described the images and videos involved as the most horrific they had ever seen." About 50 suspects were arrested, 31 in Germany and others in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Their Web site, which used sophisticated encryption technology, was in several languages. In earlier investigations, 16 people were arrested in additional countries, including one suspect in the US, an Air Force officer, who later committed suicide," said The Guardian in its report.

  4. Asia-Pacific's Net users

    They constitute a third of the world's online population (33%), ahead of North America (31%), according to data from the International Telecommunication Union. Other figures provided in the Nua Internet Surveys report show Europe at 29% of the global online population, Latin America at 5%, and Africa at 1%. "Japan, China, and Korea make up three-quarters of Asia-Pacific's Internet user population," the reports adds.

  5. Free email accounts

    The biggies - Yahoo Mail, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Netscape Mail - are increasingly dominating the free-email scene, though there are still "thousands" of options out there, the Washington Post reports. The article covers what is actually still free at the big three (with so many of their features becoming paid premium services) and which service is the most useful for what. The last paragraph links to directories of other free-email providers.

  6. South African township to get connected

    Only one in 15 South Africans had Net access by the end of 2001, reports the BBC, citing research by South African tech researchers World Wide Worx. That compares with one in every two users in the US, Canada, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong. So the BBC tells the story of long-time journalist Mkululi Bolo changing careers to help improve those numbers and give disadvantaged South Africans access to the world of information and connectivity available on the Internet. He's starting an Internet cafe in Mdantsane, South Africa's second biggest township. And here's another BBC story that illustrates why Mr. Bolo's plan might help. The story is about how Internet access is helping residents of a poor rural village in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News

 


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