Avoiding Pornographic Material

The Internet contains all kinds of pornographic material. No matter what your personal preferences are, this material becomes annoying at some point because it tends to get in the way of legitimate research. In addition, you don't want children to see this kind of material, and it can cause problems in the workplace. Fortunately, Google does provide a means of searching the Internet without running into too much pornographic material. In fact, you can theoretically eliminate all of it through wise keyword search choices.

Google provides an actual search feature that blocks pornographic sites based on your choice of keywords. The feature does work for the most part, unless your selection of keywords is less than perfect. For example, using breast as one of the keywords in a safe search produces a number of sites for cancer research and many forms of help or assistance. Using the standard search produces the expected results (13,000,000 of them). Unfortunately, figuring out which keywords to avoid isn't always easy.

Like many of the other tasks discussed in this section, you could perform this task manually and might even get good at it given enough time. However, Google Web Services can make the search process a lot more efficient. For example, you can create an application to perform a keyword translation to help you avoid the terms that produce pornographic results. When you couple this application with the safe search feature, all you'll receive is sites that contain the kind of information you need.