Gallery

Fantasy broadband league

Posted on 27 Jul 2005 at 17:12

Davey Winder goes in search of the perfect picture and joins the broadband elite

Equally impressive is that you can remove an image from the Google index if you own its copyright and do not want it made available this way: a dedicated remove content form serves this purpose. Another nice touch, not often reported, is that you can use image search on your mobile phone or PDA if it is equipped for web browsing. By going to www.google.com, you will see the Google Mobile page from where image searches are available. Certainly, Google Images meets all the criteria my client specified, apart from that most important one: adult-content filtering. Google Images, along with the rest of its search family, uses the same Safe Search filters for whatever you are looking for. This can be switched off, used in the default moderate mode where explicit images are removed, or in strict mode to remove both explicit images and text. It only works from the English interface, which could be problematical for much of the world. If it weren't for Picsearch, I would have had to recommend Google as the best of the bunch, because it did manage to filter out 95 per cent of my naughty test phrases, which were the sort of sexual slang all too often used by the kids from whom the content is meant to be kept. Unfortunately, a few glaring gaps exist. I do not intend to reveal which keywords they were for obvious reasons, but I have reported my findings to Google, which will hopefully plug them (pardon the phrase) soon enough.

No sex please, we are Swedish

Which leaves just one search engine that you have probably never even heard of, let alone used, called Picsearch. Since Picsearch is a dedicated image engine, it does not have to pander to the needs of general web searchers, which could be why it is developed indexing algorithms that not only rival Google's but actually better them. For example, a search for 'Yu-Gi-Oh!' (a trading card and animation craze that will be familiar to any parent of young children) with Picsearch does not include a picture of Scooby Doo in the first page of results, unlike Google.

Dare I say it, but despite using the same thumbnail gallery and framed results page as Google, Picsearch has produced a variation on that theme that's much cleaner - it has, if such a thing is possible, out-simplified Google! But the best thing Picsearch has going for it is that it is been designed from the ground up to be family friendly, so there are no user-configurable content filters, nothing that can be bypassed because the content filtration is integrated into the indexing system itself. Picsearch actually eliminates explicit content before it enters the database rather than attempting to limit access to it once it is in there.

My extensive testing showed this to be as near-flawless as such a system is going to get, which is about 99.9 per cent. Of course, I managed to uncover the rogue 0.1 per cent, although the image concerned was of the soft-core rather than hard-core sort. Even then, Picsearch came to the rescue by including a 'remove image' link on every page: one click and a form pops up that enables a removal request to be made for reasons of copyright, unavailability or offence. The team at Picsearch then reviews the image concerned and removes it if appropriate. A little digging revealed that Picsearch, a Swedish project founded five years ago, also manages the image search function for both Lycos and MSN, so it is not just me who's been impressed by its combination of power and parental control.

Download a year of Davey Winder's Online Security columns by heading to our Free Downloads site