'Thanks for This Important Commitment' by Dan Brekke and Rebecca Vesely 6:06pm 17.Jul.97.PDT Some words that came out of President Clinton's mouth the other day signaled that the Web's biggest search and directory services were on board for a major effort to get sites to rate themselves. "We ... need to encourage every Internet site, whether or not it has material harmful for young people, to label its own content," Clinton said Wednesday at a White House event to announce his new Net self-regulation initiative. "... To help to speed the labeling process along, several Internet search engines - the Yellow Pages of cyberspace, if you will - will begin to ask that all Web sites label content when applying for a spot in their directories." And then the self-described techno-idiot went on to thank Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos "for this important commitment." What the president and most of those who reported the big news missed is that the companies made no such commitment. Calls to Yahoo's PR department minutes after the president spoke for details on what the company would do to get site owners to rate themselves were met with puzzlement. Eventually, callers were pointed to a press release issued in the name of Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, and Excite that pledged the companies would do ... almost nothing. The release announced "an initiative to work together to promote self-regulation of the Internet." Got that? The statement talked about the importance of the First Amendment and how the directories could make a difference "by making it easy for Web site developers to rate themselves and to identify their sites appropriately." Regardless of how wide of the mark they were, Clinton's words did make news. And Thursday, some of the directory mavens were trying to clarify things. A spokeswoman for Excite said the search engines will continue to monitor evolving plans on how to keep kids from accessing pornography online. "We have committed to a) finding a system or systems for rating sites, and b) after finding that system, allowing our users to voluntarily rate themselves," said Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo.