newly ancient

Many schools try to block Google Images. It’s easy to see why since they don’t want students (and teachers) to be finding inappropriate content. However, they almost never succeed at it since there are so many ways to access to Google Images data even without going to a Google site. Instead of attempting to block all kinds of service providers, administrators should just allow users to go on Google Images to start with - where they know what they are dealing with. Since all users will be accessing Google Images from the same environment we can put in some controls. According to this report, Google SafeSearch does almost as well (which isn’t very well) as other client-side content filters. So, what we can do is ensure that Google SafeSearch is set to strict on each computer. To do this, we just add the SafeSearch cookie by going to the preferences and set SafeSearch to strict. Then, to insure that students can’t just turn SafeSearch back off we just block the settings page from being accessed. Using our handy-dandy firewall software we just block the following URLs.

• *://*google*/*advanced*
• *://*google*/*safe=off*
• *://*google*/*preferences*

Now, the settings cannot be changed so SafeSearch will have to stay on. However, your really desperate students teachers may think to simply delete the Google cookie which tells SafeSearch to be on strict. However, when there is no cookie, SafeSearch simply defaults to moderate - which does filter images. By blocking the settings page and setting SafeSearch to on we can take reasonable precaution that users are searching for images in a filtered environment.

No content filtering method is foolproof and geeks tech-savy users will still be able to find a way around any filter you set up - if they want.