List Management

The accuracy of any web filter system hinges greatly on the quality of the website list that is used.  Emerald Web Shield is powered by a proprietary List Management System that is maintained in-house.  This system allows us to provide the most accurate and up-to-date list of good and bad domains because we do not need to wait for a third party to categorize the new domains we discover or to make a correction to the database.

Categorizing websites accurately is also important for a content filtration system to be effective while not unnecessarily impeding one's web browsing.  Most web content filtration systems review sites using a single review method:  either 100% manual review by humans or 100% automatic review by computers.  Each review method has both positive and negative aspects. 

Emerald Web Shield's List Management System is more accurate than most other content filtration systems because it combines the best qualities of each review method.  Initially automatic review is performed on each site.  If a website cannot be categorized with complete certainty using this method it is placed into a gray list that is manually inspected by human site reviewers. 

Using this strategy all clearly objectionable websites can be quickly categorized while more ambiguous sites can be accurately classified by a human.

We use a program that crawls the web looking for porn sites to filter.  You can learn more the  Emerald Shield webbot information page.

This webbot crawls thousands of pages per day looking for porn sites to filter.  These sites are built up from our spam filter service, and from us crawling exisiting porn sites in our list.  We have consistantly found that porn sites tend to link to other porn sites through link sharing and other programs.  We revisit all the porn sites in our filter list about once every 45 days.   This allows us to catch new porn sites and add them to our filter.

The Emerald Scan Bot currently analyzes over 500,000 pages per day.