Safe Internet Searching

Porn built the internet. Like dandelions showing up in your yard, it can show up unexpectedly in almost any search engine results page; especially image searches. Do a search for any term and you will see explicit imagery if your search settings are wide open. I have a 9 year old who likes to do research on the internet for animals. Recently she discovered how to use powerpoint and loves to make slide-shows with images. The most logical place for her to get these images is from Google. My dilemma is keeping her safe while she searches. So how do we keep from seeing pornography while searching for rainbow brite (do little girls even know who that is anymore)?

Luckily most of the search engines try to help us out. The default setting for most of them is "moderate". This means that it will return results without the naked people, for the most part. If you want to be absolutely safe change the setting to "strict". I'll get show where to do this for Yahoo, Bing, and Google in a moment. Yahoo and Bing are the most restrictive while Google is the most relaxed. I needed a base image of a fist for a web site I am putting together. Yahoo and Bing didn't show results until the settings were changed from moderate to strict because it detected adult content within the results. Google on the other hand showed the moderate results right away while filtering out all of the nudes and the bizarre.

How to adjust settings 

Google's settings are a little tricky to find. If you go to google.com and look up at the top right hand corner there is a link, "Search Settings". Go here first. You can adjust the settings once a search is complete but the goal here is to avoid the flesh peddlers. You will then need to scroll down to the "Safe Search Filtering" category to set your desired level of security.

Yahoo search settings are contained within the "options" drop down menu to the right of the gold search button.

Bing search settings are offered to you when you perform a search that may contain inappropriate material.

Pornography is a persistent plague on the internet. I hope the steps above help to keep your kids safe from it.