How do keyword searches work?

Topic 80017 / Updated: 18-May-2011

Applies To:

Websense Web Filter, Web Security, Web Security Gateway, and Web Security Gateway Anywhere Version 7.6

Keywords are associated with categories, and then used to offer protection against sites that have not explicitly been added to the Master Database or defined as a custom URL.

When keywords have been defined and keyword blocking is enabled for a specific category, Websense software tries to match the keyword against each requested URL as follows:

If the keyword contains only ASCII characters, the keyword is matched against the domain, path, and query portions of a URL.

For example, if you associated the keyword "nba" with the permitted Sports category, the following URLs are blocked:

sports.espn.go.com/nba/

modernbakery.com

fashionbar.com

If the keyword contains characters outside the ASCII character set, the keyword is matched against only the path and query portions of the string.

For example:

"www.<extended_ascii_string>.com" is permitted (the domain portion of the URL is not matched).

"es.wikipedia.org/wiki/<extended_ascii_string>" is blocked (the path portion of the URL is matched).

When a site is blocked by keyword, the site is recategorized according to the keyword match. Reports show the keyword category, rather than the Master Category Database category, for the site.

For more information on using and defining keywords see the Filtering based on keyword section of the TRITON - Web Security Help.