CIPA search blocked

I encountered something today that has me baffled. I gave students in my class an assignment that required them to learn about and describe the educational implications of different legal mandates. To present the assignment, I identified the legal requirements as acronyms – e.g., CIPA, COPPA, FERPA.

I wanted to determine for myself what I thought they should be able to find so I did a search on each acronym myself and I was unable to generate hits when I searched for CIPA. It is very difficult to search for anything in Google without getting something so I was perplexed. I thought I may have the acronym wrong so I searched for Children Internet Protection Act and sure enough the CIPA acronym appeared on every page. This seemed very strange.

I often do not read things closely enough and at some point I read the fine print in the feedback to my Google search. There were no hits, but the follow message was provided.

cipablock

I was able to replicate this issue using students from my class who had safesearch turned on and off.  This may be an embarrassing display of my own ignorance, but why would SafeSearch block a search for sites explaining CIPA?

 

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