Terry,

I got the exact same response when I wrote them - word for word.

With my principal's OK, I decided to block all web image search engines.
Students can still search for images, but they must go through the "web"
search tabs instead of the "image" tabs, thus allowing the filter to do its
work. A recent upgrade to our firewall software allows me to block URL's
with wild card characters which, by the way, solves the problem we were
having with www.vema-online.org and www.dcfaward.org.

So far, a few students have whined a bit, but no teachers have complained.
It was becoming a continual cat and mouse supervision game trying to keep
the students out of the images. I feel very strongly that they will be much
more productive and academically focused without this distraction.

Doug Reaves

At 09:36 PM 04/05/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>We discussed this a bit a couple of weeks ago.  I finally got a response
>from Google
>about 'securing' the Google image search parameters.
>
>Note the suggestion that your proxy server may be able to enforce the
>filtering!!
>
>They didn't totally answer the query, but here's what they said:
>-----------------( copy )-------------------
>Subject: Re: School use of Google, and Safesearch issues
>
>Dear Terry,
>
>Thank you for contacting us.
>
>As you can imagine, filtering in an automated way is quite difficult.
>  It is very difficult to write a program that can catch all offensive
>webpages and pictures.   On the flip side, with 4 billion documents
>and 880 million images, we cannot use human editors to find offensive
>content.   Thus, our filter is not perfect.
>
>The safest setting that Google has is "Strict filtering" which can be
>turned on through our preferences page:
>http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en
>If you select Strict filtering here you will get a very strict filter.
>Sadly, a lot of the relevant pictures are also filtered when this is
>in use, and it occasionally lessens the quality of our results.
>
>If schools in your district deploy a proxy on your web traffic, it may
>be possible to configure your proxy to append "&safe=strict" to all
>requests to images.google.com.  This will cause strict safesearch to
>be used regardless of the preferences page setting.
>
>I would like to apprise you that Google is currently researching an
>image search product that might be more suitable for schoolage
>children.   Should that research become a product, I will notify you
>when it is available.
>
>Sincerely,
>Avni Shah
>Product Manager, Google.com
>
>
>Original Message Follows:
>------------------------
>From: Terry King <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: School use of Google, and  Safesearch issues
>Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 08:16:22 -0500
>
>Dear Google,
>
>I am a consultant on IT stuff for a local school district.  Lately
>they've had some problems with kids typing in first names in Google
>Images and getting pornographic image results.  Looking at SafeSearch,
>it blocks this stuff pretty well, but it's very easy to reset the
>preferences. Kids learn fast.
>
>Any suggestions on how to 'lock down' this setting??  Could it be
>related to a registry setting, etc??
>
>Thanks!
>
>Terry King
>[log in to unmask]
>
>
>Regards,  Terry King ...In The Woods In Vermont
>Waits River Valley School
>[log in to unmask]
>