A monthly subscription costs $9.95 for unlimited access, available at NetTrekker.com, where a 14-day free trial also is offered.
"NetTrekker works better than traditional search engines for two reasons: people and technology,” Thinkronize President Christine Willig said. “No matter how powerful technology becomes, there is no substitute for people when it comes to judging relevance of content, particularly when it's information for our children. Our technology further scrubs the Internet for unsafe sites, removing 'dead links' and delivering only information that matters to students."
Company officials say NetTrekker is the first search engine of its kind available for home purchase, marrying a hundreds-strong team of educators, proprietary technology and some 180,000 websites to produce search results that are free of adult content and relevant only for schoolwork.
Many search results are returned tagged with a small timeline icon. Clicking on it returns a multidisciplinary, graphical timeline, showing how prominent events, people, arts and more coincided with and coalesced around that subject. Every detail on the timeline is itself clickable, providing search results relevant to it.
“Kids don't have to work to find pornography on the web,” Donald Jacobs said, founder of the Center for Applied Technologies in Education at the University at Buffalo. “It finds them, in ways that parents may find shocking, like traditional searches for even the most innocent material. NetTrekker takes the uncertainty out of Internet searches for homework.”