Recently, a kids-friendly web search engine Kiddle that aims at providing filtered search results for displaying ‘safe’ and simple sites, easily understandable for children, has been unveiled. This new search engine has no affiliation with Google, but it used “safe search mode” of this popular search engine. Also, there are human editors to keep an eye on inappropriate content and images. Kiddle will feature safe search, kid-friendly results, large fonts, big thumbnails, and also modified privacy settings.
In terms of safety, this search engine blocked words such as bisexual, transgender, gay and on search of these words appears a notification that says,
“You have entered an LGBT related search query. Please realize that while Kiddle has nothing against the LGBT community, it’s hard to guarantee the safety of all the search results for such queries. We recommend that you talk to your parent or guardian about such topics.”
Apart from this, the overall search result has also been modified for the children, for example if you type Barack Obama on the search box, you get biographical material about Barack Obama and not the usual news related stuff, and if you type scientific terms like photosynthesis, you will get simplest explanations along with image representations.
Kiddle uses the same colours as Google but rather than a white background, it has an alien planet surface and a friendly droid to guide the users. The About page of Kiddle mentions about privacy and states that, ‘we don’t collect any personally identifiable information, and our logs are deleted every 24 hours.’ Also, this page explains the working of the website and how filtration is used for making the content and images suitable for children to view.
Seems like a big relief for parents of young children.