More about keywords

There are two steps involved in using keywords:

  1. Define specific keywords and associate them with categories.
  2. Turn on keyword-based blocking in some or all of your policies.
Once keyword-based blocking is enabled, web protection 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 (CGI) portions of a URL. The match is case independent.

    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 (CGI) portions of the string. The match is case independent.

    For example, if you associated the keyword “fútbol” with the permitted Sports category:

    • “www.fútbol.com” is permitted (the domain portion of the URL is not matched).
    • “es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fútbol” is blocked (the path portion of the URL is matched).
When web protection software identifies a keyword in a URL:
  • The URL is recategorized according to the keyword match.
  • Reports show the keyword category, rather than the Forcepoint URL Database category, for the URL.
  • The block page the user receives shows that the URL was blocked by keyword.

For more information on using and defining keywords see your Administrator Help.