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Zoo – A Safe Search for Kids

Lifted from embargo today by InfoSpace, Inc., Zoo.com offers a child-proof search engine for web research and news. With over 50,000 ‘adult words and phrases’ blocked, the Zoo.com search engine promises to be a kid-safe online research space, and a headache-free solution for parents. With a bit of category and content filtering Zoo pulls results from Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Fox New, Yahoo News, and ABC News.

Despite the wildlife in the playful safari motif, as the name reminds us, the contents of this savannah are meant to be tamed. In the spirit of testing the limits (as children are wont to do), however, it took but one guess for Zoo to bring me to a result that Wikipedia describes as ‘sexual’. Admittedly, the youngins probably aren’t that sophisticated, but then– with kids these days, you never know. And that’s the point. But overall, Zoo provides a decent tool for making the worldwide web a safe place to play.

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