Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Talk of the Bay

You won't find much sex on this Web search

By DAVE GUSSOW
Published May 22, 2006

A search for the word "sex'' on Google brings about 725-million hits. Over at RedZee, however, the same search won't work.

"We decided that if anything porn related is searched for we simply do not respond at all, and simply bring you back to the home page,'' said Ryan J. Krupnick, vice president of the St. Petersburg company developing the engine.

Its goal is a clean, family-friendly search engine. But it isn't an easy job.

"If you know how saturated the Internet is with pornography, you know how difficult it is to get rid of pornography,'' Krupnick said.

The search engine (www.redzee.com) has been up for about a year, and it's in version 2.0 of its beta. The company recently began promoting it more aggressively as its filters improved. RedZee claims it's 65 percent successful in keeping offensive results out and is continually trying to improve.

The site, which is ad-supported, has to police paid results. It dropped Amazon as an advertiser because, while the recent search for sex didn't turn up anything, an ad linked to some racy results at the online retailer.

Krupnick said RedZee gets more than 1-million visits a month. The private company has 30 employees and isn't profitable, but it makes enough to keep going and even run TV ads on cable channels.

RedZee is not attempting to compete with Google and Yahoo, the giants of online search, but rather to offer an alternative for families concerned about what their kids see, Krupnick said.

"We're just carving our niche and growing it as big as it will grow.''

[Last modified May 22, 2006, 05:09:45]