Forcing Google Safe Search

One of the ways Google is trying to help ensure surfing the web safely, is a feature in their image search called "safe search". When "safe search" is enabled, any images that have offensive (pornographic) content is prevented from showing up in the search return. It's a nice feature, but in an office environment there's generally no way to force everyone to use it. And in fact many users trying to get around web filtering products like a proxy do so by using Google's image search without safe search turned on. The problem is that Google caches many images that traditional proxies block when you go directly to the page hosting the image, but these traditional proxies aren't smart enough to block the cached image in Google.

Blue Coat Systems' ProxySG interestingly enough offers a couple of features to help prevent this proxy bypass from occurring. First, they can actually search embedded URL's like the ones in Google's image search and block the images from appearing in a search return, so rather than seeing the picture the end-user see's only a broken link. The other option they offer is the ability to force safe-search for every search that's done. They do this by re-writing the URL request for the search into a safe-search every time a user requests a search, regardless of whether the safe-search feature was enabled.

These are two great tools to help keep your HR policy enforced, without having to worry about holes in the proxy that might otherwise get your IT group into trouble.