Search engines clean up |
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Search engines clean up |
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German search services collaborate to exclude child pornography, right wing extremism, and glorification of violenceRecently it was announced that the largest German search services have joined forces in association with the organization FSM. FSM tries to make companies that offer web services keep an eye on what kind of material they make available to their users. By Lars Våge, InternetBrus (March 8 2005) FSM is short for Freiwilligen Selbstkontrolle Multimedia-Diensteanbieter. The organization has been working since 1997 to hinder the dissemination of material that is perceived to be harmful to children and adolescents. Competitors pulling togetherIt is both nice and surprising to see that competing search services like Google.de, AOL Deutchland, Lycos Europe (including HotBot and the news search service Paperball, among others), MSN Deutchland, Yahoo Deutchland, T-info, and T-online all choose to work together in cooperation with FSM. Working to exclude harmful sitesIn addition to the codex of FSM, the search services have also agreed to an additional codex which includes using a blacklist of web sites compiled by BPjM (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien). The search services are working to find a way to make sure that these sites will not appear in their search results. This will mean some pretty complicated work for the tech staff of these search services. The agreement also includes an effort to make it easier for the users to understand how the search services work. Censoring or taking responsibility?In my opinion it is an important event that search services now take some responsibility for what they show in their search results and which web sites they lead their users to. Of course it is possible to bypass this limited protection by using other search services. German searchers are not enclosed by a compact firewall, like Chinese searchers are. But an effort to clean up the worst parts of the results pages has to start somewhere. Some people will emphasize how this limits the freedom of expression and might even call it censoring. But the search services are commercial companies, not governmental institutions, and they are of course free to make resolutions of this kind. In this case I think it can be fair to say that the companies in question are doing a good thing censoring sites like these, whereas on the other hand the censoring that is implemented by other companies at the request of the Chinese government is not something to be applauded. Read more about this collaborative effort:
This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators. Internetbrus is owned and edited by Lars Våge and Lars Iselid. Lars Våge works as a librarian at Mitthögskolan and a programmer for JL Informationsteknik. Lars Iselid is a librarian at the Umeå University Library, freelance journalist for the computer magazine Datormagazin, He can be found blogging under the pseudonym Cyrille at Iaslash.org. Lars and Lars are co-authors of a book on Internet research: Informationssökning på Internet. © 2005 Lars Våge and Lars Iselid
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