With Flickr and Yahoo the geographical location is a factor in adjusting the filter. “If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off. If your Yahoo! ID is based in Germany you are not able to view restricted content due to your local Terms of Service.” Something we also saw in YouTube’s self-regulatory model, which is partly based on a global/legal level as well. Except that was not communicated so directly to the user community.
Yahoo! SafeSearch cannot guarantee that as well that all explicit content will be recognized and filtered out of the results. While “Google’s SafeSearch system seems to reflect a focus on avoiding underblocking (i.e. avoiding linking to sexually-explicit content) at the expense of increased overblocking (omitting listings of content that is not sexually-explicit).”
Google’s SafeSearch works through continual crawling of the Web by a filter and by incorporating updates from user suggestions. Google’s filter uses advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories.
“Google’s help site suggests that SafeSearch is primarily driven by automated systems — computer classification of sites that are sexually-explicit versus not, in contrast to the human review purportedly used by companies like N2H2 (ref: N2H2’s “Human Review Advantage”). For lack of human review of SafeSearch’s filtering decisions, Google readily admits that its system is not completely accurate.”
But even though it’s an automated system, it does leave open the option for the users to request removal of a certain page with the Webpage removal request tool. This allows Google to improve the SafeSearch filter.
An interesting aspect is that on Google and Yahoo! the filtered content won’t show up in the results, but in Flickr they show it distorted, like this:
The distortion of the image is comparable to the warning screen on age-restricted videos on YouTube as well as the hiding of comments through rating. It’s visible to the community when it has been flagged and the choice to watch the video/picture anyway is made by the user self.
This means that in Google and in Yahoo! this SafeSearch function works similar to flagging. It controls the content on a site, but instead of deleting unwanted content SafeSearch holds it back from the viewer if he/she doesn’t which to see it. And this time it is not the community that decides which content isn’t conform wishes, but an algorithm makes this decision.