Using Google SafeSearch

The Internet is one scary place. For one, you are unsure of the identities of everyone else–anyone can pretend to be a thirteen year old girl or boy just to attract the attention of other kids. Also, if you have kids yourself, you don’t want them stumbling upon adult or mature websites. And if you’re on the conservative side or if you’re easily offended, I don’t think you want to be stumbling upon adult websites yourself.

Google and other search engines are among the major referrers to any website. Ask any webmaster and you would probably get the same response. Majority of traffic to any indexed site would be from the search engines. That’s why Google is important to the adult sites. Bad for conservative people like you? Not really.

You can turn on Google’s Safesearch feature if you don’t want search results to include sites marked as adult or mature (by language or the images). This is an option you can set in the preferences part of Google–just click the “Preferences” link at the right of the search bar.

Then you can select according to whether you prefer to filter out sites with adult images only, or sites that contain adult terms altogether.

Here’s an example. The first image below is a search done on the term “nude” with SafeSearch turned off.

And here, below, is a screencap of a search on the same term with SafeSearch turned to “strict.”

Now that’s a very big difference, isn’t it? The non-safe search displayed all sites related to the search term used. But when strict SafeSearch was turned on, Google did not display anything, since the term “nude” was included in the list of banned words.

Google doesn’t require that you’re logged in for SafeSearch to work. The site will drop a cookie for your browser to use everytime you or your kids visit Google to search. However, to be sure that this setting is turned on (or off, as you prefer) everytime, it’s best to apply the settings while logged into a Google or Gmail account.