SafeSearch is a Google search

Google search

Google or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. Google Search is the most-used search engine on the World Wide Web, receiving several hundred million queries each day through its various services....

 feature that acts as an automated pornography filter. A 2003 report by Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School

Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...

's Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the Center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of...

 stated that SafeSearch excludes many innocuous websites from search-result listings, including ones created by the White House

White House

The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...

, IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

, the American Library Association

American Library Association

The American Library Association is a non-profit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with more than 62,000 members....

 and Liz Claiborne

Liz Claiborne

Anne Elisabeth Jane "Liz" Claiborne was a Belgian-born American fashion designer and entrepreneur. Claiborne is best known for founding Liz Claiborne Inc. which in 1986 became the first company founded by a woman to make the Fortune 500...

. On the other hand, many pornographic images slip through the filter, even when "innocent" search terms are entered. Blacklisting certain search terms is hindered by homographs (e.g. "beaver

Beaver

The beaver is a primarily nocturnal, large, semi-aquatic rodent. Castor includes two extant species, North American Beaver and Eurasian Beaver . Beavers are known for building dams, canals, and lodges . They are the second-largest rodent in the world...

"), blacklisting certain URLs is rendered ineffective by the changing URLs of porn sites, and software to tag images with copious amounts of flesh tones as porn is problematic because there are a variety of skin tones and pictures of babies tend to have a lot of flesh tones. Google's ability to filter porn has been an important factor in its relationship with the People's Republic of China

People's Republic of China

China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...

.

On 11th November 2009, Google introduced SafeSearch Lock. This feature was added to allow users with Google accounts to lock on the 'Strict' mode of SafeSearch in Googles Web, image and video searches. Once configured, the user can log out of their Google account and the setting will stick to prevent any change to the filtering level.
Unfortunately, flaws in the way Googles SafeSearch Lock works allow it to be easily disabled or bypassed using any of the following methods:

• Clearing your Web browser cookies
• Switching your Web browser into 'private mode'
• Using an alternative Web browser which hasn't had the lock turned on
• Logging into the computer as a different user which hasn't had the lock turned on

At present, the only way to prevent the lock being easily disabled is to use a third party application such as SafeSearchLock. This has the added benefit of not needing a Google account and also supports the similar safe-search or family-filter modes of other Web services such as Bing (search engine), Yahoo, YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

, Ask Jeeves, DailyMotion

Dailymotion

Dailymotion is a video sharing service website, headquartered in the 18th arrondissement, Paris, France. According to Comscore, Dailymotion is the second largest video site in the world after YouTube....

 and Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

. There are also sites like safe-search.org which provide an equivalent to the google.com homepage, enabling Safesearch by default.