Foreign language searches

[DaveJ2717uk]

Have been asked an interesting question by an ofsted inspector. If a foreign language student does a bad web search in his native languages does it get blocked? Answer I gave was yes, for those doing a search using the four most popular and most used search engines Bing, Google Yahoo and Ask is yes those searches will be blocked as the web filter(smoothwall) forces safe search on all of those no matter what language the search is attempted in. But does it? and what about other less popular search engines dog pile etc.?

Might be an over reaction but thought it worth a question..

[pcstru]

I think the most accurate answer with any system based on heuristics would be "maybe" or if you want a stronger answer "probably"! The problem is, the only accurate way to say whether a page will be blocked, is to try to load the page operating from the appropriate user context.

 

What we try to do with filters is manage the risk of a student seeing inappropriate material, so we should have an expectation that there will be some probability that a 'bad' page will be blocked; but there is always a chance that something might get though. We simply try to maximise the probability of a bad page being blocked and minimise the probability that something gets through.

[Opendium_Steve]

Search term blocking on a school filter isn't terribly worthwhile - Google/Bing/etc can do a much better job with their safe search settings than a school's web filter can ever do because they have a lot more data to work with. Safe search is fairly language-agnostic, but you're right that not all search engines support it. Maybe it's worth blocking access to search engines that can't have safe-search enforced by the web filter (not sure how easy that is in Smoothwall. We have been considering a category for that ourselves though).

[unixman_again]

A bit OT, but I remember when the BGFL blocked the image search on google.co.uk and google.com, because too many students where typing in "porn" to look at the nudie-rudies. The BGFL forgot that you type in google.fr/images google.de/images etc etc and search for images.

 

Surprisingly here, we don't have safe search enabled. I don't know why. AFAIK, as part of JANET we get unfiltered internet and it's up to us to filter it, which of course, we do, so you can't get to anything that you shouldn't. (This is a bit annoying, because I can't see what the very good wine shop in the high street has on offer, unless I go in. ) At the last school we did have safe search enabled and leaving it to google is probably the best thing to do.