Blue coat blocks legitimate sites

The place where I work as a contractor has recently migrated to policy based web filter service from Blue Coat. After the migration the filters have started filtering legitimate community websites and some weblogs. Most notable is the current hot community website Orkut. I have been a very recent user of Orkut and liked its concept a lot and was using it a lot from home. But sometimes I have to access it from my office as well. Surprising is that Blue coat is categorising Orkut as "Adult/Mature Content". I am subscribed to various communities like my school, college, geeks, mathematics, puzzles etc. Granted that many of the communities may be mature, but it is not appropriate to do a blanket categorisation of a website as such.

There may be other annoyances with this as well which will deny people working here access to legitimate sites like travel or something. I remember it happening once. If the service is going to create additional work and pain to users, then I am not sure if it is going to be very popular. Although, Orkut is not strictly related to my work, I just check up on there while taking a small break from work. Instead of going out for a smoke (which I don't) or coffee, I try to surf the net.

I would rather want to see a filtering service which would rate pages rather than websites. Similar to what Google does for search. It indexes individual pages and not entire website ensuring that the visitors get the most relevant results for their search query. Similarly a filtering service should read through the page and block a particular page if it contains inappropriate content based on meta-tags on that page.

Just to give an example: We all know and have experienced our share of spamming on IM. There are some people who would message you and want to do some cyber fun with you. They will give a link to their Yahoo! profile (I only use Yahoo IM) and it will contain their explicit pictures. Yahoo! asks you to click a button which confirms that you are over legal age before allowing you to see the page and the page itself is tagged to be for people over 18 years of age. I am still able to view that page containing explicit picture, because it was on Yahoo. What if the filtering service blocked access to entire Yahoo because of these pages. I am sure the service provider will have plenty of irate customers.

That in my opinion should change and access should be granted or denied based on the content on page and not the site.