Yahoo Japan Corp., Japan's largest Internet portal site operator, plans to offer a service that lets parents restrict their children's access to Web sites with harmful content by using filtering technology from a company it recently acquired, company sources said Friday.
Yahoo Japan may offer filters for its search engine, chat services and bulletin boards as well. The service may also be offered via Yahoo BB, an Internet service provider owned by Softbank Corp.
The specifics of the filtering service are still under discussion, including whether it should be offered for free, the sources said.
The technology was developed by Surfmonkey Asia Inc., a Tokyo-based company acquired by Yahoo Japan last month that markets Web site filtering software to homes and schools.
Surfmonkey Asia's software blocks sites on a preset list of "banned sites" and also scans other sites for particular character strings, patterns, words or phrases it has banned. It can also block the transmission of offensive words on discussion boards and chat services.
Such sites can be unblocked by parents or other authorized people with the proper IDs.