Getting Dynamic

Thursday, April 16, 2009, 3:58 pm

You probably don't know about it, but a debate rages between Internet Filter vendors over whether it's better to filter the Internet based on a big fat list of bad URLs, or to use a smart filtering engine to analyze every URL users visit to make the BLOCK/ALLOW call.

We at ContentWatch, of course, know the right answer—combine the best of both worlds.

URL (list-based) Filtering is very fast, and requires no particular expertise in analyzing web page content. In fact, it requires no expertise, since what happens is, a user tries to visit a website, and the filter simply checks the URL against a huge (hopefully) list of banned websites. If the URL is on the list, BLOCK. If the URL is not on the list, ALLOW. Simple, right? Right.

However (you knew there was a “however” right?). List based filters have a huge downside. The content on web pages changes constantly, not just daily, but all the time. That means that any list is instantly out of date. Sure, you can have a team of monkeys categorizing new websites, but millions of new websites are created every single day. You can't keep up.

Enter Dynamic Filtering. That is, develop an engine that analyzes the content of every web page visited, in real time, and use special algorithms to categorize the content of the website, and then, based on administrator settings, do the BLOCK or ALLOW thing.

And as a bonus? Make a list of websites whose content never changes categories. Some websites will always contain inappropriate content. Always. So the smart thing to do is put those few thousand known websites in a list, for instant categorization, and analyze the rest, in real time. And by “real time” I mean right now. Instantly. With no noticeable delay.

That's the ContentWatch solution. We pioneered Dynamic Filtering, and we have it down to a science. The list part is easy. The analyzing part? Pretty hard. But we've already done the work, so you don't have to.

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