The site lets college students rate their professors on such traits as easiness, helpfulness, clarity and “hotness,” and its popularity has prompted a slew of news articles quoting teachers maligned or flattered by their anonymous reviews. Last month, the New York Times’s (NYT) Ethicist column addressed an unnamed instructor who asked whether it’s appropriate to suggest that satisfied students post a rating to improve his profile.

“Universities have always done professor evaluations, but that information was kept private,” said Carlo DiMarco, vice president of university relations at MTV Networks, whose MTVu division bought RateMyProfessors in 2007. The site helps students “seek the wisdom of a much larger group,” he said, when figuring out which classes they should be taking, a process that used to happen via word-of-mouth with a handful of classmates.

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There are tools for dealing with the problem, most commonly, filtering software that attempts to bar sexual, violent and other objectionable material. But these can frustrate kids and parents, by either blocking too many things or not blocking enough.

Avatars help guide users

Some other approaches, such as the parental controls built right into the latest Windows (MSFT) and Macintosh (AAPL) operating systems, offer parents more control by allowing them to specify what Web sites a child can access. But that requires close and constant involvement by the parent as the child seeks access to more Web sites.

This week marks the launch of a parental-control service with a somewhat different approach. It’s called KidZui, and it aims to offer kids a safe subset of the Internet where they can roam freely without triggering parental worry. KidZui, for children ages 3 to 12, hopes to emphasize the positive, rather than the negative.

The service, from a San Diego company of the same name, claims to encompass 500,000 safe sites, photos and videos, ranging from pop culture to science, comics and games to history. You can watch the latest “American Idol” contestant, learn about dinosaurs, delve into history or visit popular kids’ sites, such as Webkinz and Club Penguin.

The sites, photos and videos included in KidZui are approved by a team of about 200 parents and teachers across the country, and are ranked by age, so that a site that might be right for an 11-year-old isn’t served up to a 4-year-old.

While a child can establish a list of friends in KidZui, and can share content with them, there is no instant-messaging or email function.

KidZui isn’t free, and it can’t be accessed via a regular Web browser. Instead, you must download a special KidZui browser, from kidzui.com, that runs on either Windows or Macintosh computers. I tested it on both platforms, and it downloaded quickly and installed smoothly.

The service nominally costs $99.95 a year, or $9.95 a month, but there is a 30-day free trial and an introductory rate of $49.95 a year, or $4.95 a month. It has no ads, other than those already present on Web sites kids visit.

A key selling point of the service is that busy parents can simply set up KidZui and trust that their kids will be safe online. To that end, the program can be optionally configured, so that a child can’t escape from it to use the computer’s standard browser, for example. A parent can set KidZui to launch when the computer starts up, in full-screen mode. In this mode, KidZui automatically disables or hides the common keystrokes, icons, commands and techniques that allow users to switch to, or to start up, other programs.

In addition, when KidZui is running in this locked-down mode, the child can be barred from quitting KidZui without a parent’s password. In my tests over the past week, I found some loopholes in this lockdown system, but the company plugged each leak I turned up. I can’t swear that a clever kid won’t be able to escape from KidZui, but the program blocks most obvious exits.

Inside the software, the company has tried to create a fun, lighthearted world. Each child is represented by a “Zui,” a cartoon-like character that can be customized with hair, clothing and other features. There are lots of sound effects, and kids can rate content with illustrated tags ranging from “best” and “cool” to “boring” or “gross.”

When a child types in a term like “ocean” KidZui offers a list of related terms as well, to guide further exploration. If a child types in a search term or a Web address that has been banned from the KidZui universe, a message appears saying “This page isn’t available on KidZui, but your parents can add it for you.” This applies not only to terms typed into KidZui’s own search bar, but also to terms a child enters at sites like Wikipedia or in the search boxes embedded in other sites. The main pages of Google and Yahoo can’t be summoned.

If a search or Web address is new to KidZui, a different message appears promising that it will be reviewed.

I did find some holes in this system. For instance, I was able to get to The Wall Street Journal’s Web site and do an internal search on “Spitzer,” which turned up a story on the former New York governor’s sex scandal.

Parents can get detailed reports about the KidZui activities of each of their children and can tweak the content they can see by adding specific types of material, such as “athletic violence,” and approving or blocking specific Web sites.

For parents who want to allow limited Web use by their young children without constantly micromanaging their online activities, KidZui may be worth a try, but don’t expect it to be perfect.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

But the vastness of the Internet can leave many people wondering where to begin, especially when asking sensitive questions about education. And, even in a sea of discussions and forums on education, parents are often hungry for one piece of information above all else: data that helps them select a school for their children.

Education.com’s SchoolFinder (top right) enhances an already rich Web site (top left), while GreatSchools.net (above) works education-related content into school search results.

So this week I tried three education-related Web sites that dedicate some or all of their resources toward providing free school comparisons, including demographics, test results, teacher-to-student ratios and percentages of students eating free and reduced-price lunches.

I performed various school queries using Education.com Inc., GreatSchools Inc.’s GreatSchools.net and SchoolMatters.com by typing in a ZIP Code, city, district or school name. Overall, GreatSchools and Education.com offered the most content-packed environments, loading their sites with related articles and offering community feedback on education-related issues by way of blog posts or surveys. And though GreatSchools is 10 years older than Education.com, which made its debut in June, the latter has a broader variety of content and considers its SchoolFinder feature — newly available as of today — just a small part of the site.

Both Education.com and GreatSchools.net base a good portion of their data on information gathered by the Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, the government entity that collects and analyzes data related to education.

SchoolMatters.com, a service of Standard & Poor’s, is more bare-bones, containing quick statistical comparisons of schools. (S&P is a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos. [MHP]) This site gets its content from various sources, including state departments of education, private research firms, the Census and National Public Education Finance Survey. This is evidenced by lists, charts and pie graphs that would make Ross Perot proud. I learned about where my alma mater high school got its district revenue in 2005: 83% was local, 15% was state and 2% was federal. But I couldn’t find district financial information for more recent years on the site.

All three sites base at least some school-evaluation results on test scores, a point that some of their users critique. Parents and teachers, alike, point out that testing doesn’t always paint an accurate picture of a school and can be skewed by various unacknowledged factors, such as the number of students with disabilities.

Education.com’s SchoolFinder feature is starting with roughly 47,000 schools in 10 states: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey and Georgia. In about two months, the site hopes to have data for all states, totaling about 60,000 public and charter schools. I was granted early access to SchoolFinder, but only Michigan was totally finished during my testing.

SchoolFinder lets you narrow your results by type (public or charter), student-to-teacher ratio, school size or Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), a measurement used to determine each school’s annual progress. Search results showed specific details on teachers that I didn’t see on the other sites, such as how many teachers were fully credentialed in a particular school and the average years of experience held by a school’s teachers.

The rest of the Education.com site contains over 4,000 articles written by well-known education sources like the New York University Child Study Center, Reading is Fundamental and the Autism Society of America. It also contains a Web magazine and a rather involved discussion-board community where members can ask questions of like-minded parents and the site’s experts, who respond with advice and suggestions of articles that might be helpful.

Private schools aren’t required to release test scores, student or teacher statistics, so none of the sites had as much data on private schools. However, GreatSchools.net at least offered basic results for most private-school queries that I performed, such as a search for Salesianum School in Delaware (where a friend of mine attended) that returned the school’s address, a list of the Advanced Placement exams it offered from 2006 to 2007 and six rave reviews from parents and former students.

GreatSchools.net makes it easy to compare schools, even without knowing specific names. After finding a school, I was able to easily compare that school with others in the geographic area or school district — using a chart with numerous results on one screen. After entering my email address, I saved schools to My School List for later reference.

I couldn’t find each school’s AYP listed on GreatSchools.net, though these data were on Education.com and SchoolMatters.com.

SchoolMatters.com doesn’t provide articles, online magazines or community forums. Instead, it spits out data — and lots of it. A search for “Philadelphia” returned 324 schools in a neat comparison chart that could, with one click, be sorted by grade level, reading test scores, math test scores or students per teacher. (The Julia R. Masterman Secondary School had the best reading and math test scores in Philadelphia, according to the site.)

SchoolMatters.com didn’t have nearly as much user feedback as Education.com or GreatSchools.net. But stats like a school’s student demographics, household income distribution and the district’s population age distribution were accessible thanks to colorful pie charts.

These three sites provide a good overall idea of what certain schools can offer, though GreatSchools.net seems to have the richest content in its school comparison section. Education.com excels as a general education site and will be a comfort to parents in search of reliable advice. Its newly added SchoolFinder, while it’s in early stages now, will only improve this resource for parents and students.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com