Web Safety NZ New Zealand Internet Safety
Google Safe Search for Kids. In case you haven’t noticed, search-engine giant Google has made some changes to their interface. How does this relate to Google Safesearch? Well, if you search for anything you’ll notice a drop-down link to the right of the search button. This drop-down link doesn’t appear on the Google homepage, you have to be on the page that displays your search results.
Clicking this link will give you the three filter options: off, moderate, and strict.
Keep in mind, this filter can easily be changed by children if you haven’t locked your Safesearch settings (see below for instructions).
This information is an an update on this topic as there are serious differences in the search results if you haven’t locked this on your home computer. You won’t see a huge difference by changing the filter from “moderate” to “off” in the Web results, but do the same in Image results and you’ll be shocked at what comes up.
For example, a harmless search like “teens on cell phone” on a moderate filter is exactly that, harmless. But simply change the filter to off and you won’t believe what comes up. I didn’t believe what came up. Parents should take immediate action on their home computer.
If you’ve ever felt that porn was a threat to your child’s online safety, then take Google Safesearch seriously. Continue reading below to learn how to lock it.
In addition to being safe on social networks, we can’t forget that the Internet is full of malicious websites. Google.com is the most popular search engine in the world and is used by millions of people every day, most likely including you and your children. Without the proper filtering, searching in Google’s image or video database can yield some scary results, and it’s important for parents to know how to shield their children from those results.
Fortunately, Google has provided multiple ways to safely filter your child’s search results.
Setting and Locking Google Safe Search –
- Head over to www.google.com, and in the top right corner you’ll see a link called “Search Settings”. Click it.
- You should now be at the Preference page. From here you can set the type of filtering that you want. Choosing “Strict filtering” is the only way to activate Google Safe Search.
- Now all you have to do is lock Safe Search. To do that, just click on the link called “Lock SafeSearch”. From here you’ll be prompted to log into your Google account (if you don’t have one, making one only takes a second). Then you can lock it.
NB: Article reproduced from http://internet-safety.yoursphere.com/