• by Tricia Despres , January 26, 2007

Young Bobby’s assignment from health class is involves some research on breast cancer. He enters “breast cancer” into a search engine on his computer. Much to his parent’s astonishment, Bobby gets an eyeful of more than just health statistics.

Enter Zoo.com: InfoSpace launched this search engine to help kids ages 8 to 13 surf the Internet, while avoiding sexually explicit content. Zoo compiles results from Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, as well as news from ABC, Fox, and Yahoo News.

InfoSpace claims that Zoo.com is one of the first Web filters to focus on tweens. “When you are talking to this age group, you don’t want them to even realize that the Web site is safe,” explains Rod Diefendorf, vice president of online and local search at InfoSpace. “Parents are the ones who can receive comfort from that kind of information.”