Kids ages 8 – 13 have a lot of options when they go online. So our goal with Zoo is be compelling both in terms of content and the look of the site.

To this end, we are working with kids and using market research to continue to improve the product. We are also going to be marketing directly to kids in a way that says, this is a great site for you—you can get what you need here.

Of course, if kids are deliberately looking for sexually explicit material, they can find it online. What we are aiming to do is provide a place where kids will want to be that excludes this kind of inappropriate material. Indeed, external research shows that many kids find sexually explicit material when they are NOT looking (or wanting) to find it.

Overall, Zoo should be compelling to kids on the results and interface it provides. That is what we strive for as a company. While we think filtering is very important to ensuring a positive experience for both kids and their parents, we know the driver of kids’ usage will be how much they like what they get from the site.

As for security, Zoo.com is not meant to replace parental control programs, but rather can complement the use of them.

As with everything, it needs to be tweaked and optimized.

For Example do a search for the word… LUST … there were a few questionable sponsor links present.

But, overall, this is unquestionably, a worthwhile alternative to the reqular Search Engines.

But how do you prevent kids to simply search on live.com with safe search feature turned off? That option remains there whether we have zoo.com or not. Kids can always get unfiltered results on other search engines.

So the safety such as parental control must come from an OS, or may be from a browser but in the latter case it won’t extend to other programs. A website unless it is unique in some sense can’t significantly enhance the safety of kids. Because if a kid wants, the kid could always use another similar website.