Ask Jeeves supports safe searching

We at Ask Jeeves are committed to children benefitting from safe, fun and educational web use, and so on 8 February 2011 we are supporting Safer Internet Day, a European-wide initiative focused on internet safety.

Because it is so important to protect young people from harm online, we believe that the safety of young people while using the internet at home or school should also be a high priority for all parents, guardians and teachers.

Ofcom research reports:

• 84% of 8-11 year olds and 94% of 12-15 year olds who use the internet use search engines;
• The majority of 5-7s and 8-11s spend most of their time using the internet with an adult in the room (75% and 62% respectively);
• However, as children get older, they increasingly spend their time using the internet on their own;
• Those who mostly use the internet on their own account for one in six internet users aged 5-7 (17%), three in ten aged 8-11 (30%) and over half of those aged 12-15 (57%).

To ensure that children are protected whenever they use the internet - whether on their own or with an adult - we encourage parents, guardians and teachers to get involved as early as possible in children's use of the internet, and to make use of the resources and follow the best practice tips described below.

At Ask Jeeves, we offer content filtered settings and do our best to ensure that filtered results do not contain adult-oriented or other potentially offensive content. For users who have not chosen to set content filters, we provide warning pages indicating when adult-oriented and other potentially offensive content might be included in search results. We also support the work of specialists such as the Internet Watch Foundation and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre to ensure that our search results are as free of illegal content as they can be, and to help prevent the internet from causing harm to young people.

Resources for parents

For parents and others wanting to ensure the safety of children online, the first step is to understand the potential risks. For a great resource with a wealth of FAQs and key tips, visit the Thinkuknow micro-site launched by CEOP at http://www.thinkuknow.co.uk, which has been designed to give teachers, parents and child protection professionals some ideas and suggestions about how to get involved.

The Thinkuknow micro-site offers free educational resources for all ages - including a new programme for 5-7 year old children - interactive maps, online banners for websites and details for the 'Think before you Post' schools video competition and much more.

Childnet has also produced a search guide for parents, carers and children and this could form a helpful starting point for a discussion with children about how to stay safe online. See http://www.childnet.com/downloads/searchGuide.pdf.

Top tips for keeping children safe online

As explained more fully on the sites mentioned above, there are many ways to encourage children to search safely and to access content which is appropriate for them. These include:

• Supervision of children while online
• Teaching children to search (and type their search terms) as accurately as possible
• Using a child safe search function, comprising a finite quantity of content edited by the provider and designed (but not guaranteed) to filter out explicit or adult-oriented content from search results
• Searching using default safe search settings and, if possible, setting safe search 'on' to its maximum setting
• Locking safe searches onto a computer used frequently by children
• Installing filtering software
• Setting filters to remove adult websites from non-adult related searches

Ask Jeeves recommends that parents, guardians and teachers use as many of these approaches as they can.

Report inappropriate content to us, and illegal content to the IWF

Because, despite our best efforts, we cannot guarantee that our filtering or warning systems will be 100% effective, and because sometimes even seemingly innocuous terms unrelated to adult content can trigger adult content, we urge you to contact us if you have found any inappropriate results using Ask Jeeves. If those results may be illegal (e.g., if they may be images of child sexual abuse, criminally obscene content or incitement to racial hatred), please report them directly to the Internet Watch Foundation at www.iwf.org.uk.