I'm on the board of directors of an after-school program that puts kids on
the Internet, among other things. (The real focus is to help kids tell
stories with multimedia computers.) We have a lot of concern about
liability if they're able to get to material that their parents find
objectionable.
This may be the classic "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a
nail," but I'm interested in using our search engine's knowledgebase
capability to filter out objectionable material. It's not clear yet how
well this will work, but some of our customers' experience suggest that in
many ways, filtering agents are more accurate than search-based agents.
There are other applications, as well, such as filtering advertising,
flames, etc. I'd love to see more research and experimentation along those
lines.
Nick