Crawler Parental Controls review

As this software is free, our expectations weren't all that high. However, it has all the features you'd expect in a paid-for program, and it's also easy to use.

Like many programs we tested, Parental Controls missed some particularly British search strings, such as certain sectarian insults used in Scotland and Northern Ireland. When it does know a word or phrase, however, the program is intelligent enough to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use. It blocked racist websites, but allowed us to access encyclopedia articles on the history of racism.

The software did equally well in most of our other tests. It blocked all access to pornographic material, whether through a search engine or a web address typed straight into our browser. Nor were we able to access material about violence, weapons, gambling or pirated downloads; the program was even intelligent enough to block only BitTorrent downloads that it recognised as either inappropriate or copyrighted. We were a little disappointed to find that it blocked MSN Messenger entirely, though, rather than filtering or recording conversations.

Like all the other programs here, Parental Controls has a time-limit feature that allows you to specify when a given user is allowed to go online. As with the other programs here (except FilterPak), this feature worked perfectly. We won't mention it again, but you can assume it's there.

There doesn't appear to be a catch. We thought the software probably installed some sort of spyware or marketing cookies, but we ran two anti-spyware programs and couldn't find any. Parental Controls can be over-zealous, but otherwise it's a very good piece of software.

Author: Karl Wright