Blocked Domains
Claims made by a filtering software company as to the number of URLs or sites their product will block cannot be substantiated unless that software has transparent lists. You have to have the block list to begin to verify any “blocked sites” claim. Filtering Companies that encrypt their lists so they cannot be viewed (almost all filtering companies) willingly trip into marketing myth-takes when they attempt to sell their products. It is too easy to be the biggest the best the most advanced blah blah blah…when no one can see the list.
Since a domain may be comprised of a considerable number of sites and URLs, (tens of thousands in some cases) there is more than one way of arriving at the total number of sites claimed to be blocked.
For example consider geocities.com . We have geocities.com on our bad site list because it contains much pornography. However, it also contains hundreds of thousands of personal web pages do not have pornography and ought not to be blocked.
Overblocking can be rectified by typing geocities.com in the good site list. That is the end of the overblocking problem. This will not let all the nasty sites through because they will largely be caught by a secondary methodology of filtering - the phrase filter phrase filter.
Is blocking geocities one overblock or hundreds of thousands of overblocks? Is this one url being blocked or is it perhaps a million urls being blocked? This is just one example which shows that without access to the block list it is impossible to determine how many and what sort of URLs are being blocked.
We provide a fluctuating list of up to 450,000 porn domains chosen to block millions of urls as expediently as possible. But this is only part of our overall filtering approach. For example by placing the few url of the sites that process the cash payments many commercial porn sites with that linkage are are taken out with just a few url’s.
- There is also an analytical phrase filter providing an additional level of filtering.
- There is in fact no way of knowing how many domains are blocked.
A good filter is transparent and configurable. It is capable of importing any private or open source list. There is no way of measuring how many url’s this can be. One current list we are offering now contains over 450,000 porn domains.
Ultimately, how many sites/domains/urls are blocked is up to the individual end user. We provide a base list and access to other lists, the end user decides which to use. Or if he prefers not to do this it defaults to its default settings.
Currently we are in the process of total transparency, not just for our clients but to the world as a methodology of adding and deleting URL’s.
To give you an idea of the scope to make the list fully transparent it is 500 + .html pages and each page is 20 word processor pages in length.
That is a lot of pornography.
