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Google Safesearch
Posted November 9th, 2009 | in Google, How To, Lead Story | No Comments »One of the great things about the internet is that anything you can imagine is out there somewhere. But sometimes you don’t want it appearing on your screen.
Even if – like me – you oppose censorship, there are times when you simply don’t want the “racier” material to show up in your Google search results. For instance at work or when children may be present. That’s when Google’s SafeSearch comes in useful.
What Is SafeSearch?
Safe Search is Google’s system for removing “explicit” content from its search results. It works by analysing a site’s keywords, URLs, etc to try to determine what content falls into this category.
There are three different settings for SafeSearch. The default when you first use Google is “moderate”. With this setting Google will remove explicit images from your search results but leave ordinary pages intact.
You can change the setting to either “strict” or “off”. Strict filtering also removes web pages that Google considers explicit whilst “off” disables filtering completely.
SafeSearch, like all filters, isn’t perfect. And obviously it only filters Google search results, nothing else. It’s also easy to change the setting so it’s best used to protect you rather than restrict others. If you’re looking to protect kids from inappropriate content then SafeSearch alone isn’t enough, you might want to buy specialist child protection software.
(Update: How to lock SafeSearch).
How Do I Change SafeSearch?
You can easily change the SafeSearch settings between “off”, “moderate” and “strict”. On the main Google page click on “Search settings” at the top right:
This takes you to the Google Global Preferences page. The safe search options are about half way down the page:
This changes the setting for all your future Google searches. If you just want to change the setting for a single search you can do so from the Advanced Search page. First click on the additional options link at the bottom of the form:
then choose whether or not to use SafeSearch for this query:
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