Parents, are you constantly in fear of your children stumbling upon some disturbing or inappropriate content when searching the internet? Protecting innocent eyes should always be a top priority when children are using the internet, and now there’s another tool to hopefully make parents’ lives a little easier. Enter Kiddle, a visual search engine for kids, powered by editors and Google safe search.

Kiddle promotes itself as a “kid safe visual search engine“, and it mostly delivers that. Kiddle editors help to check and handpick the first few search results from safe sites and pages written specifically for kids. There’s also a “guard robot” to help block bad words in any search query. Kiddle also allows for user-submitted keywords and sites to block, to further increase the safety of Kiddle’s results.

Another concern with children online is privacy, which is why Kiddle does not collect any personally identifiable information and there is no registration to use the search service. They clear their server logs every 24 hours.

One major thing to note is that Kiddle has no affiliation to Google whatsoever. The site is powered by Google custom search and uses Google cookies to serve search results, but nothing else. Anyone can add a Google custom search form to their website. The site is independently owned, hosted and developed.

Will Kiddle suffice for all of your children’s searches? The answer is unequivocally NO. In testing, some things sneak past Kiddle’s “safe search,” revealing that it can serve content that you, the parent, may not deem appropriate. Does this render Kiddle useless? No, it’s just that software and editors can only do so much to clean up and filter the content that is online. You have to see Kiddle as another tool in your arsenal to try to keep your child safe from inappropriate online content.

In today’s world, it’s almost impossible to avoid having your children being exposed to the internet, so it’s necessary to have safe options to protect them. From kid-friendly search engines like Kiddle to parental controls and software, the choices keep improving. However, no software is perfect, and no tool can ever replace a parent’s due diligence and oversight to make sure their child is safe online.