Firm turns the screw on office porn surfers

OFFICE WORKERS may soon find themselves under scrutiny from a new 'early warning system' which alerts the boss if they attempt to open any unsavoury links served up by a search engine.

Searchahead is a corporate software tool which polices the search results thrown up by engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! flagging up sites which contain malware or dodgy and offensive content.

A colour-coded warning system categorises each link as either good, bad or decidedly ugly, alerting users to sites flagged as off-limits under their company's web policy.

Any attempt to access a red-flagged site may be automatically blocked and the attempt reported to the bosses.

Sites are blacklisted if they contain malware or pornography, or contain content promoting racial hatred or illegal activities.

So let's imagine you dip into Google and type in 'underwear'.

While Calvin Klein gets the green light, Mormon-underwear.com is flagged up as potentially dodgy. And should you decide to click on Frederick's Lingerie Sale, you'd trigger a corporate alarm system which would see the Internet police charging over to your desk.

The bottom line is that users can no longer claim they 'inadvertently' visited sites that violate corporate usage policy, says Scansafe, the company behind Searchahead.

"It puts the company's acceptable web use policy in front of the user and gives them the power to know where they are going," says product manager Spencer Parker. "It helps prevent any embarrassment."

But he admits the software is largely about preventing users from wasting time by aimlessly surfing the web.

"Tests have shown there is a 15 per cent reduction in time spent browsing," he said.

An online version of the software is available at www.scandoo.com µ