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Microsoft Family Safety Filter Blocks Google

Posted by timothy on from the can-neither-confirm-nor-deny dept.

mike.rimov writes "I saw that part of the brand new Windows Live package is the Family Safety Filter, so I decided to give it a spin. Turned it on, set it to 'basic filtering' (their lowest level), and went to Google ... oops, it blocks Google! So I logged into the settings and added Google as an exception. Google still wouldn't come up. Just in case, I turned off the family filter: voila, Google. As we all know, 'Don't be evil' is not part of Microsoft's motto! Oh yeah — and with the filter on, Microsoft's own search engine, live.com comes up." Anomaly?

5 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. Probably intentional by W2k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just a wild guess: Perhaps the family filter talks to Live.com in order to filter "inappropriate" results out. Other search engines not owned by Microsoft don't support this integration, so the filter blocks them as they would otherwise be a trivial way around the filter.

    --
    Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
    1. Re:Probably intentional by commodore64_love · · Score: 3, Interesting

      >>> [Fortunately,] this will very likely drive a large chunk of people away from using it, and will make a lot of users think that MS is just being a dick.

      Fixed. ;-)

      And I'm not just being anti-MS here. The computer industry was a lot better when we had multiple manufacturers (Atari, TI, Commodore, Apple, IBM) and multiple OSes (GEOS, TOS, Workbench, MS-DOS, MacOS) because it promoted innovation. Since Microsoft became dominant circa 1998, innovation has slowed to a crawl, and I think the weakening of Microsoft so people can explore alternative companies would be a good thing ("fortunate").

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
  2. adsense too? by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From a post made in December, it also apparently blocks AdSense ads (which would make sense, since they're part of Gooooogle). Anybody else know what this "Safety Filter" blocks?

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    This guy's the limit!
  3. what about other search engines? by MyDixieWrecked · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'd imagine that they're not intentionally blocking google because they're a competitor (although it could be a contributing factor). I would think that they consider Live.com to be more compatible with family filter and google allows access to cached pages which the family filter may not be able to block.

    Of course, one way that MS could show good faith would be to open up the family filter's API in some way so as to let it play nice with google and allow google to disable cached pages for users of the filter.

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    ...spike
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  4. Wait a minute... This is important... by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ok, the Summary is #1 wrong, and #2 people here have no idea what the hell they talking about.

    The FAMILY SAFTEY is working as it is supposed to, as it is designed to setup for your freaking KIDS...

    On Basic, it allows Google.com, and that is working as intended.

    On Strict, it does not, as some parents wouldn't want their kids using Google that WILL RETURN DONKEY PORN VIDEOS because there is no way to intelligently filter the Google results.

    If Google doesn't want to be blocked on Strict, they can provide RSS OPENSEARCH features, like everyone else is doing. However Google is intent of refusing to provide RSS OpenSearch features.

    The BROKEN here is Google not supporting a web standard in their search engine results and method of returning results.

    As for the whole MS is keeping people from Google, this is insane. They have no locks on Live search even for IE users (letting people use any search engine easily as their default Browser search engine).

    MS has even had to 'code' around Google's lack of standards in the OpenSearch and other areas to allow 'Search Tips' and dropdown features from Google Search, since Google doesn't provide the standard 'hint' or 'search tip' features that ARE a standard and other search engines and even sites like Wikipedia provide inherently.

    Google is the ones locking the doors here, in several ways, and yet someone the 'intelligent' people at SlashDot haven't even noticed any of this going on? Go look up Search Connector and RSS Search feeds, and RSS Search filtered results. Everyone and their dog supports them, except Google.

    They are even integrated in Windows7 Explorer so users can search inside a Folder or Open/Save Dialog box and get web pages, video, images, links, etc from just about any online search engine or provider of content EXCEPT GOOGLE because they refuse to support RSS OpenSearch and RSS OpenSearch Filtering.

    This time it comes down to MS doing the right thing, and Google intentionally not 'playing nice with others' and by proxy it breaks the abilities of the Live Family Safety features on the strict setting. If Google doesn't want to be excluded, provide freaking intelligent results or results that can be ensured to not have donkey goat porn, which apparently Google can't do or doesn't want to do effectively.

    This time it is MS providing the standard web search technology and is the OPEN search engine when it comes to interfacing with all the OPEN standards.