And the plot thickens. About.com just pulled a stunt of it's own, they now require adult verification to look up porn; looks all well and good hiding under the umbrella of "protecting the children". But that is not the truth.
 1) Let me explain a little about adult verification systems. Adult verification systems pay webmasters by how many people they get to sighnup with the verifier, in otherwords a commition sale. Thats fair. But if the search engine steps in and takes the sale, what insentive dose the webmaster have to give you the sight in the first plase. See the picture, as the search engines get more greedy there are less sights for you to find what you are looking for.
 2) Just how well do adult verification systems work at keeping kids out of porn. Simple, they don't. Maybe if we were back in the twenties when kids were to be seen and not heard they might stand a chance, but bottom line is kids talk. And kids have a lot more time on their hands then we do, they find the passwords, and there isn't a news server, chat server, or internet fourm out there that can keep them from posting them, and reading them, and of course they do go to school, they do have friends. Bottom line is passwords don't stop kids, a good swat on the ass so they can't sit down for a month might help.
 3) If engines like About were truley conserned, if this was anything other than a money making gimmic, they would have choose a free Adult Verification system instead of a pay one.
 

Yahoo is no longer a search engine, they are now only a listing of paid advertisers. This constitutes a major change in the way we view the web. What has been an open exchange of ideals, the web, a place where everyone has a voice bad or good. As of December 2000 Yahoo wishes to change all of this, you must now pay $200 to have them even look at your website. LookSmart, and GoTo are already following suit. But we can change all of this, don't use Yahoo, who wants to look at just a list of paid advertisements anyhow. There are still plenty of free search engines, ones that still want to index the web and would appreciate your traffic. To list a few: Dmoz, About, Excite, InfoSeek, and Northern Light. Sites such as Lycos, AltaVista, Google, and AOL all just use Dmoz for their data base, not that such is bad, only if you can not find that you are looking for on one of them, using another won't help. And in the end, anything is better than paid advertisements, after all isn't that why we watch TV.