I'm the mother of an eleven year old girl and the editor of FamilyMatters.tv. We recently published a very disturbing article about kids looking for MySpace decorations and want to get the warning out to parents. Please read: http://www.familymatters.tv/level_4/safety/warningtoparents.htm

Good story. I personally use Adblock Plus with Firefox to help cut down on this. Sad but I think some people deliberately target their advertising like this. I was helping one of my kids look for a kid friendly site on the net and I had mistyped the url and an adult site came up. Based on the name of the url they were targeting people that misspelled the kid site.

When we were researching the article we did the same search on "safe" search engines and/or with filters. Here's what we found:

We accessed the same sites with Google's SafeSearch Filter for explicit text and images on and Dogpiles filter set to Heavy (highest setting).

AOL Teens also returned these sites in their search results.

AOL Kids returned only one site in their results, but that site linked to one of the bad ones from the home page.

Yahooligans gave results that had nothing to do with the search term. (Most were of a Denver Post article on a murder that was under investigation.) Ask for Kids, Cybersleuth-kids.com, and Ithaki.net/kids all yielded zero
results... so it's likely kids would look elsewhere.

It was the inability of the search engine filters to recognize these sites that really motivated me to get the warning out to parents.

I use my router for filtering out some sites. I know it isn't on the same level but my oldest had been editing pages on wikipedia. He wasn't trying to do anything bad but just didn't know what he was doing and messed up some pages. It got me blocked for a few days. To make sure that never happens again I blocked him from ever accessing that site again. I did it at the router level. I think I can even filter sites based on key words. So it doesn't matter what any of the search engines do because he can't get past my block.

Also there are programs parents can (and should) put on their computer that block these sites automatically. They aren't really all that expensive either.

Check these out.

http://www.cyberpatrol.com

http://www.netnanny.com