GOOGLE PAGE RANK AND ADVENTURE BUSINESS

Previously, I've shared with you Google's commitment to protecting children online. As part of these efforts, we've joined two recently-formed industry initiatives to combat child pornography and child exploitation on the Internet. No group can keep the Internet safe by itself. We're excited about the promise of collaborating with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and other companies to advance this important mission.

Here's the NCMEC release announcing our participation in the Technology Coalition and the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography.

Google is deeply committed to providing a healthy and trusted online environment for all of our users, and especially children. While the Internet provides an amazing opportunity for people to connect with useful information, some online material poses serious risks to children and families, and some online behavior violates the law and should be eradicated. Child pornography, in particular, is a horrific and vicious crime. Today, I testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations about Google’s efforts to keep kids safe online. Among the initiatives that I highlighted:

- Google has a zero-tolerance policy on child pornography. We prohibit any advertising related to child pornography. When we become aware of child pornography anywhere in our search engine or on our site, we immediately remove and report it to the appropriate authorities.

- We work closely with law enforcement to help track down child predators, and respond to hundreds of child safety-related requests per year.

- We help families stay safe online with tools like SafeSearch, which enables users to filter adult content from search results. We also promote online safety through our support of the WiredSafety education campaign.

These are just the beginning. We believe that much can be done to combat child exploitation online, and are committed to doing our part to protect the Internet as a safe place for all.

A big topic of discussion lately is the increasingly large influence media of all kinds can have in the lives of children and teens. Last week I participated in a conference in New York about this important issue, sponsored by CommonSense Media and The Aspen Institute together with several organizations that have a stake in child safety. (Here are videos of the speakers.)

The conference organizers convened a panel of experts and executives to address the question "Does the Internet Change Everything?" I approached this question by suggesting a framework of four scenarios that characterize the online interactions of children and the content they encounter:

1. When a child isn't actively seeking objectionable content online, and doesn't encounter any, no action is needed.
2. When a child isn't seeking objectionable content, but comes across it inadvertently, ISPs and other online services, like Google, and child safety organizations can provide tools and resources to help families effectively monitor their child's online interactions.
3. When a child is actively seeking out objectionable content online and finds it, parents are primarily responsible for devising a solution.
4. When a child isn't seeking out objectionable content, but someone deliberately forces such content on them, this amounts to exploitation -- and requires government involvement and cooperation by ISPs and other online services.

So that you can see the types of things we're doing to promote safer online interactions, I've mapped some of Google's activities in this critical area of child safety online to these scenarios -- particularly 2 and 4, where we feel we can make the greatest difference.

In connection with the second scenario, we have invested in developing family safety technology and tools, including SafeSearch, a filter that uses advanced technology to block pornographic and explicit content from Google search results. We've also partnered with child safety organizations to educate families about ways to use the Internet and other types of media safely. These efforts include joining forces with CommonSense Media to provide their movie reviews in Google search results to assist parents in identifying healthy content. We also work with organizations like i-Safe and iKeepSafe to provide online public service announcements that promote access to resources about Internet safety.

When the fourth scenario occurs, we work closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to identify, investigate and prosecute child pornography and exploitation. We remove child pornography immediately when we become aware of its presence on our search engine or content services, and report all instances of child pornography to law enforcement through the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. We also respond to hundreds of child safety-related law enforcement requests each year, in addition to requests to preserve data related to these cases. Lastly, we donate hardware and software to improve NCMEC's ability to manage incoming reports of child exploitation and assist NCMEC in promoting its CyberTipline, a resource for reporting cases of online child sexual exploitation.

Keeping kids safe on the Internet is a huge task -- bigger than any single government, company or family. We're pleased to work with our industry partners, law enforcement and child safety advocates around the world (including the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK and the Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle Multimedia (FSM) in Germany) to address this issue.

As we develop new initiatives in this critical arena, we'll keep you posted.

To support law enforcement work in combating Internet-related crimes against children, last week we participated in the 6th Annual Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) National Conference in San Jose, California. Each year, the ICAC National Conference brings together hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement investigators, forensic experts and prosecutors to participate in workshops and lectures that provide law enforcement with the tools necessary to investigate and prosecute online crimes against children.

My conference session, entitled “Google: Combating the Online Exploitation of Children,” gave the attendees an overview of our products and tips for law enforcement agencies on how to work effectively with Google on child exploitation investigations.

ICAC Task Forces across the country are doing invaluable work in investigating and pursuing online child exploitation cases, and we're pleased to be sharing technical knowledge and resources with people working on the front lines in this battle. Government and industry interaction through the ICAC National Conference is critical to online child protection, and we plan to remain engaged with law enforcement in an effort to protect children on the Internet.

We know that technologies like the "v-chip" can be used to keep kids from seeing inappropriate content on TV. And while technology has an important role to play in protecting kids online, it's as important that parents implant a symbolic "v-chip" in their children's minds to guide them when it comes to deciding what online content is and is not appropriate.

That was one of the observations I shared this week at the Family Online Safety Institute's conference in Washington, D.C. The Internet provides an amazing opportunity for young people to express themselves creatively and access immense quantities of useful information. Kids are using geospatial, mobile and social networking technologies, for example, to learn in new, interactive ways. The Internet also provides unparalleled opportunities for free expression, enabling kids and adults alike to deliver tremendous benefit to society by voicing sometimes unpopular, inconvenient, or controversial opinions.

At the same time, there is some online content and activity that is unsuitable for younger users. Google is dedicated to supporting parents' efforts to educate and protect their children when they go online. We've invested in developing family safety tools that empower parents to limit what online content their children can discover. Our SafeSearch filter, which users can adjust to block explicit content from their search results, is an example of this type of technology.

On YouTube, where we host user-generated content, we aim to offer a community for free expression that is suitable for children and protects them from exploitation. Our work to keep YouTube safe for children includes clear policies about what is and is not acceptable on the site; robust mechanisms to enforce these policies, such as easy tools for users to police the content by flagging inappropriate videos; innovative product features that enable safe behavior; and YouTube safety tips.

We've also partnered with child safety organizations, including CommonSense Media, i-Safe, iKeepSafe, NetFamilyNews, and, of course, the Family Online Safety Institute to increase awareness about online child safety. In addition, we cooperate with law enforcement and industry partners to combat child exploitation and help minimize the uploading of illegal content, offering training and technical assistance to law enforcement officials and providing groups like the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children with technology tools to help them be more effective in their work.

Keeping children safe on the Web is the shared responsibility of parents and families, educators, industry, and government. We have a shared responsibility to help teach children the media literacy skills they need to become savvy online and offline information consumers and, working together, we believe this goal is attainable.

In the spirit of National Internet Safety Month, we welcomed Ernie Allen, co-founder and president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to the Googleplex last week to discuss child protection issues.

For those not familiar with it, NCMEC works closely with federal law enforcement across the U.S. to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation and to help find missing children. From serving as the clearinghouse for reports of online child pornography to issuing Amber Alerts when children go missing to reuniting families in the wake of Katrina, NCMEC is at the forefront of efforts to protect society's most vulnerable members.

In a policy talk called "Beyond Milk Cartons: Keeping kids safe in a digital world", Ernie provided an overview of NCMEC's work and chatted with Googlers about the ever-changing landscape of child protection challenges shared by parents, educators, advocacy organizations, and technology companies like Google as we work to help families make smart choices online. Watch Ernie's talk on YouTube.

Technology is an invaluable tool for addressing some of these challenges. In a recent example, a team of Google engineers dedicated their 20 percent time over the last year and a half to build cutting-edge software for NCMEC that uses image and video recognition technology to help NCMEC analysts more effectively sort and review incoming reports of child exploitation. NCMEC analysts sort through tens of millions of images in child sexual abuse investigations, and we've tried to leverage our expertise in organizing huge amounts of data to help make their important work more automated and efficient.

When it comes to keeping kids safe on the Internet, we believe that education for families, support for law enforcement, and empowering technology tools, like our SafeSearch filter and the NCMEC software, are all critical pieces of the puzzle.

Tackling online child safety issues is no small task, but we'll continue our collaboration with organizations like NCMEC, along with other partners in schools, government and industry, to take collective strides in the right direction.

Since it was founded in 1984, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has reported more than 570,000 child exploitation leads to law enforcement agencies and assisted with more than 140,900 missing child cases, resulting in the recovery of more than 124,500 children.

The advent of the Internet has unfortunately provided child predators with a new avenue to exploit children. In August 2006, we joined NCMEC's Technology Coalition Against Child Pornography, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop solutions that hinder predators' ability to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic in child pornography.

In an outshoot of that industry initiative, I discovered some other areas where I thought Google could help the staff at NCMEC. For instance, to date, NCMEC analysts have reviewed more than 13 million child pornography images and videos to assist law enforcement agencies working to identify and rescue children. This task has been time-consuming, and NCMEC analysts were simply getting overwhelmed by all of the data they had to sift through.

One of our core strengths here at Google is our ability to manage and organize immense amounts of information -- whether it's text, image, audio, or video -- and make it more useful and accessible for users. As a member of Google's research group, I realized that NCMEC had an immediate need for some of our research-stage technology. They needed help organizing and making sense of the enormous number of images and videos sent to them every week through their CyberTipline and from law enforcement officers nationwide.

So we went into overdrive. I recruited some fellow engineers to help me build tools that NCMEC might find useful. Throughout 2007, using our 20% time, we created innovative software tools to help NCMEC track down child predators through video and image search. With these tools, analysts will be able to more quickly and easily search NCMEC's large information systems to sort and identify files that contain images of child pornography. In addition, a new video tool we built streamlines analysts' review of video snippets.

The keys here were organization, scalability, and search. In particular, the tools we provided will aid in organizing and indexing NCMEC's information so that analysts can both deal with new images and videos more efficiently and also reference historical material more effectively. We hope the tools we've built for NCMEC will help its analysts make the important and often time-sensitive work of investigating child predators faster and more efficient.

For me, working with NCMEC provided an incredible opportunity. It allowed us to immediately deploy some of our latest research in image and video analysis in a real-world setting. On a personal note, I've been truly inspired by the entire NCMEC team's dedication and diligence in completing such a heart-wrenching mission.

You always hope that your work will eventually be used do some good in the world, and this was an amazing chance to make that hope real by creating tools that have the potential to aid investigations of child predators, find child victims and reduce the flow of child pornography on the Internet.