A new search engine released today by Thinkronize Inc. claims to provide pornography-free text and image search results for families with children and others who’d rather not find material intended for consenting adults.
netTrekker home is based on an award-winning version, netTrekker classic, which has been used since October 2000 by seven million students in 11,000 schools in 48 U.S. states, according to Thinkronize.
“Kids don’t have to work to find pornography on the Web; it finds them…,” said Dr. Donald Jacobs, founder of the Center for Applied Technologies in Education at the University at Buffalo. “netTrekker home takes the danger, uncertainty, and irrelevance out of Internet search for homework.”
According to Thinkronize, 87 percent of children use the Internet regularly, and most of them use search engines as their primary research tool. However, one in four kids accidentally encounters porn on the Web, and search engines serve as gateways to those accidental encounters. Moreover, studies have found that only 6 percent of the Web is relevant for schoolwork, according to a Thinkronize statement.
Porn links aren’t the only ones omitted from netTrekker home; commercial websites are, too. For example, the company said a search for “Ethan Allen” on netTrekker home returns only 15 results, none of which links directly to the furniture store chain that shares its name with the American patriot.
Also, unlike other search engines, netTrekker home is not free. A monthly subscription costs $9.95 for unlimited access.
The downside? netTrekker home includes only 180,000 websites culled from the millions available online by “a hundreds-strong team of educators.”
“No matter how powerful technology becomes, there is no substitute for people when it comes to judging relevance of content, particularly when it’s information for our children,” explained Thinkronize President Christine Willig. “Our network of hundreds of educators, all specialists in specific subject areas, continually searches the Internet for sites that are pornography-free and truly helpful for schoolwork. Our technology takes it from there, further scrubbing the Internet for unsafe sites, removing ‘dead links,’ and delivering only information that matters to students.”
