Editor's Choice: Web Filtering
Editor's Choice: None
Highly Commended: Net Nanny, CyberPatrol, We-Blocker
This was a highly contentious issue, but in the end we feel we can't offer the Editor's Choice award to any package, because in our opinion no package from our test group performed sufficiently well enough. There will always be an issue with the growth of the Net and keeping filtering products up to scratch, but even within our group of test sample pages, each package had enough basic weaknesses to disqualify it from Editor's Choice contention. We suspect it will take someone hitting upon a new filtering method to revitalise the industry and bring some true effectiveness, in much the same way as Google changed the search engine world with the use of its pagerank technology.
So, what's the end consumer to do? Our highly commended packages got the nod for individual approaches that we'd love to see in one single package. Net Nanny's the only large-scale package to offer up its blacklist for all to peruse, something we think should be mandatory in any package. CyberPatrol's filtering was mostly effective, and it offered sensible reasons for why pages were blocked to end users, which should make communication between users and administrators that much easier. We-Blocker challenges the notion that filtering products need to be expensive packages, although for a package that relies on community support, we can't fathom why its lists aren't yet open. We should note that while we like the individual approaches of each package, it would be a very bad idea indeed to try running all three at once.
The best approach at the home/SOHO level, from the experience in our testing, would be to watch your users very carefully. One of the packages we've tested can be a useful adjunct to that monitoring, but none of them truly match up to what you'd expect from a software product in any other category.
| Introduction | Editor's Choice | How we tested | |
| AllegroSurf | ChildSafe | ChildWebGuardian | ControlKids |
| CyberPatrol | Cybersitter | Net Nanny | WeBlocker |
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