Protecting children from the hazards of dangerous and adult material online has been a great challenge for parents and schools since the internet became a part of daily life for the majority of Americans. Some may feel in their frustration that the easiest solution is to simply keep children off the internet entirely, but research has shown that keeping kids offline can stunt their development in the information age.

The internet is an indespensible resource for the near instant transfer of information, and being able to navigate it effectively is an indispensable skill in the modern world. Students can benefit greatly from the educational material online too, so it is understood that some type of compromise must be made to allow children some access to the internet. Web filters are the most common tools that parents and schools utilize to attempt to permit children online without giving them access to absolutely everything on the web.

The balance that any web filter must create between permitting some but not all content in is a complicated one, and some services are criticized for either blocking legitimate content or allowing objectionable content through. Some filters even suffer from both problems simultaneously. Even worse, a percentage of filters can easily be completely undermined by inquisitive teenagers with hardly any technical skill.

Google, being the single most popular search engine on the planet, is the first stop for many web users and especially most of the younger users. There’s plenty of safe content out there for children to access, and Google has always offered its own filter for search results, which has been very successful. Unfortunately these settings could easily be altered by any user, including the ones who should{n’t not} be accessing unfiltered results in the first place.

Now, Google has launched a new improvement that allows users to lock the SafeSearch option with a password to prevent minors from altering the settings. The results subsequently generated by Google’s search engine while these SafeSearch settings are in place will also be visibly different from the normal search results, with a large image of colored balls in the upper right corner letting parents and teachers know even from across the room that the filter is still working.

There’s more than one way to keep kids safe online, and the best decision is to combine several layers of protection. Google’s new SafeSearch is a effective tool to help keep offensive material away from children, but it’s no replacement for active involvement with children while they are using the internet and education about the dangers that lie in the unpleasant places on the web.

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