Understanding keyword scanning with Securly

The Securly web filter scans keywords on Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, and Wikipedia to ensure that students are always displaying safe search results and protected from inappropriate/ malicious content.

Admins can enable or disable the keyword scanning option if they find it necessary for any specific policy. This can be achieved by changing the keyword scanning settings for a particular policy.

Policy Setup

1. Login to your Securly account and navigate to the ‘Policy Editor’.
2. Choose the policy for which you want to apply the keyword scanning settings.
3. To enable keyword scanning, toggle the switch in front of ‘Keyword Scanning’.
4. Securly has a number of keywords built into our system. This is associated with the blocked categories. Note that enabling a blocked category will add the associated words from that category to keyword scanning.
5. You can add additional keywords to the policy or global-level denial list. This requires the format *keyword*. Example *unblockedgames*.

User experience

- Whenever a user searches for something related to any of the blocked categories he will be displayed as a blocked page.

- If the user searches for something from categories that are not blocked, but if the safe search has been enabled, the user will be displayed safe search results.

Keyword scanning thus helps admins ensure that students have always displayed safe search results.

This is in addition to other great search features like Safe Search Mode and Restricted Image Search for Creative Commons.