Zecos ChildWebGuardian
Installation of ChildWebGuardian follows the normal path for filtering programs, and includes a mandatory master password that must be created. Strangely, it presumes that the master user will be masculine, as it notes that "In the future only the man knowing this password will be able to change program settings."
ChildWebGuardian's interface is easy to enough to follow, with tabs that cascade down the left hand side of the program window, covering the user log, White and Black lists, Allowed Time, Popup Killer function, Forbidden Words and standard options dialogues.
ChildWebGuardian's web site claims that the use of black and white lists isn't a terribly effective way to block content, and while that's not a wholly baseless statement, we did find it odd to note that the program contains options for creating both black and white lists. The supplied blacklist is always visible, but it contains only four entries, so if you wanted to build a custom-allowable list, you'd have a fair amount of work to do.
Without the use of a custom blacklist, ChildWebGuardian falls back on what it calls 'Content Analysis', and what we'd call word filtering. The list of words is easily available, but it's also quite short in every category but Sexually Explicit terms. Its Sects/Cult section, for example, only has six terms, and two of those are 'sect' and 'cult'. Another, and we're not entirely sure why, is 'Jehovah'. In general word filtering in and by itself is a highly ineffective way to filter sites; there's too much of a possibility of false positives (sites that shouldn't be blocked being blocked) and no real method to block offensive or inappropriate images.
If you're using a browser that isn't Internet Explorer, then ChildWebGuardian isn't for you, although to its credit it does note this fact on its web site product pages. Another weakness in ChildWebGuardian's approach is that it doesn't have a tolerance setting for words, merely a word counter. If the blocked word appears more times than you've selected, it'll be blocked, seemingly regardless of origin or context.
With the overall weakness of a word filtering mechanism in mind, we weren't expecting great things from ChildWebGuardian. The first thing that we noticed when we began testing is that the content filter isn't terribly fast, and often potentially objectionable material would begin to load before the filter kicked in. With its larger library of potentially offensive sexual terms (including some obscure foreign language terms that could be handy to have blocked depending on where you're surfing) it performed best on pornographic sites. ChildWebGuardian, along with most of the other filters in our tests, passed a couple of notably disgusting and offensive image archive sites with nary a whisper.
In every other area of our testing, however, ChildWebGuardian showed the weakness of its word filtering model; with word filtering enabled it blocked the AIDS Quilt site, an anti-hatecrime site and a filtering parody site that contained no genuinely offensive material. At the same time, it had the common problem of loading part of the KKK site, and, as noted above, would often load material before blocking it, leading to partial exposure of material. To see how far the word filtering would go, we did a google search for "Essex", only to find the results blocked.
Ultimately, while ChildWebGuardian's interface is quite easy to get around, it does very little to justify its US$24.95 asking price. Its word filter was overzealous in our testing, which might sound appealing until you realise that you'd spend an awful lot of time filtering out false positives, negating the value of having a filter in the first place.
Zecos ChildWebGuardian
Company: Zecos Software
Price: US$24.95 via download
| Introduction | Editor's Choice | How we tested | |
| AllegroSurf | ChildSafe | ChildWebGuardian | ControlKids |
| CyberPatrol | Cybersitter | Net Nanny | WeBlocker |
1%
4%
