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Search Engines & Proxy Sites |
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The Internet is commonly used to search for information which is performed with the help of web sites called search engines. There are numerous search engines available but some of the more common ones are www.google.com, www.yahoo.com, www.bing.com, www.msn.com, and In order to remain competitive, search engines have diversified and now offer things like image and video searches. Microsoft's www.bing.com actually plays portions of the videos when a user hovers over the thumbnail picture of the search results. Image and video searching is very popular with students doing school projects. It is also a way to look up inappropriate images and not be detected by filtering programs. The search engine shows the images within its own results page therefore it does not flag filtering software. If the user selects the picture the corresponding web site address would attempt to open and then be subject to filtering. However, the original picture shown is large enough to cause concern. In addition, many search engines restrict results based on filters but offer customizable filter settings for a user to quickly turn them off. Parents do have the ability to set the preference options when using the search engine that keeps all searches in "safe filtering" mode and require a password for changes to be made.
When a proxy site is used the only Internet activity history to be found will be the proxy site itself because as far as the computer is concerned the user only visited that site. The remaining activity was done within the site. Here are some examples
of Proxy websites. |
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