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Lemak Lemang

A walk down the Yellow Brick Road of Malaysia's Corridor of the future

by Jeff Ooi, Malaysia

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A kids' search engine that parents shoould adopt

Aug 22, 2007 14:13

I first knew of Kindernet.com when its CEO Mark Trudinger was making a presentation at Kickstart Asia 2007in Bintan recently.

From the conference hall, I sent an SMS to my wife who was about a thousdand kilometers away and asked her to check out if it suited our 11-year-old girl who is very much into the Internet these days.

Kindernet is, after all, positioned as the search engine for children. It works on a two-prong strategy that is by keeping the Internet safe for children by filtering out undesirable content, and by "showcasing" desirable sites for kids and "directing" them to surf these chosen pages.

Be that as it may, strangely, at Kickstart Asia which was organized by MediaConnect Asia, Trudinger sold it to us as "Democracy Internet". He talked about search engines that include "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".

The "Bad" are those that dish out search results which resemble "pro-choice" or marketing-skewed Web sites. He also talked about sexual predators who lurk on the Net with their vicious agenda. In such an environment, cyber-bullying is common, posing new dangers to children.

Trudinger warned of 500 million "Bad" sites, and for the safety of our children, Kindernet has decided to crusade for the safety of the kinder ones whenever they use search engines to trawl information or research for homework.

Whereas, the "Ugly" is what Trudinger classified in the likes of "YouPorn", which is already banned by Google Germany. Trudinger classified these sites as Porn2.0.

Children protection
By the time Trudinger and his fellow panelists finished their presentation, my wife had browsed through the Kindernet site and returned an SMS with an aye. She said she was impressed and would walk our kid through it when she got home.

For a start, my wife quite liked the Surprise feature on Kindernet, where selected children-centered Web sites are framed as pre-selected Web sites, an old and controversial way of showcasing a third-party Web site.

Trudinger (right) explaining the finer points of Kindermet.com to journalists from Malaysia

To be frank, I was baffled by Trudinger's attempt to position Kindernet as Web 2.0, linking it to social networking and other interactive cyber darlings of the day. From the feel and look of it, Kinder is more pre-Web 1.0 to me. The only justification that Trudinger tried was the premise that children may be tech-savvy, but they are not socially savvy. Is that the context for Kindernet being Web 2.0, social networking and all?

Trudinger, who was formerly distributing CyberPatrol--a browser-based child-protection software--justified himself by citing his personal experience with Myspace's friend list. He said he used to receive messages from so-called online friends who turned out to be actual spam that linked to socially undesirable content, i.e. content laden with sexual and pornographic messages.

Putting it in the case of the children, Trudinger said even if parents do explain the dangers of sexual content to our children, they might still be swarmed by it when they start to elevate to the regular social networking Web sites. I believe Trudinger had failed to convincingly connect his Kindernet, the children-centric search engine, to the gamut of Web 2.0 and social networking tools. Nevertheless, I'm ready to buy his marketing stance that the pervasiveness of search engines may expose children to online pornography even when they are not actively searching for such content.

Still on beta, Kindernet is now available in English, Chinese, French, Japanese and German.

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EasyNet5

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EasyNet5 says...
I don't believe in censorship generally, but I guess it has to be for kids of 11. My nephew came across hard core pr0n page and his mom said he was pretty upset (he's 12). But for older kids, they should have freedom to explore. I had a look at kndernet and I couldn't search for "nude", damn! ;-)

Aug 23, 2007 01:13

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mangalraj

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mangalraj says...
I check the web site its awesome. It will be very usefully for children to get what they search for. The amazing one is its not letting to search for bad words. Most of the Children get in to pornographic site accidentally and Google and yahoo are not safe search for children by default. We have to change the setting to filter the adult content even after filtering you will not get results related to kids. I had asked my school IT people to make kindernet as a default page in kids lab. as a teacher it give 5outof 5 :) for kindernet.

Aug 23, 2007 12:56

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henr0129

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henr0129 says...
It's about time somebody is taking the initiative to protect our children. While I generally disagree with censorship, I think keeping children under-12 from 'accidentally' finding porn is a great concept. I've decided to make Kindernet the default search engine for my children. Keep up the good work Kindernet!

Aug 24, 2007 03:46

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About Jeff Ooi

Jeff Ooi is an Internet and e-Business consultant based in Kuala Lumpur who's spent the last four years blogging internationally on the tech scene, on anything and nothing. Which doesn't really explain why most of his own technology is about three years out of date. He doesn't even own a PDA after his Palm V crashed. He's on 3G, though... Lemak Lemang refers to coconut-flavored sticky rice stuffed in a bamboo container.