As powerful as search engines are, they come with some drawbacks. With today's children using the Internet at earlier ages than ever before, they're bound to stumble upon inappropriate content online sooner or later. To help with this issue, there have been several kid-oriented search engines, but their results have been mixed.

Now, there's a new search engine on the block designed just for kids. It's called Kiddle and it's a custom Google search engine to help kids get relevant and easy-to-understand info without exposing them to explicit sites. Note that this site is not created by or related to Google in any way, as some have reported.

Kiddle's About page explains its workings — SafeSearch is applied to all searches, blocking a large amount of explicit material. However, it goes further by ordering its search results based on how friendly they are for kids. The first 1-3 results are pages written specifically for children, reviewed by Kiddle editors.

The next several results are safe sites that contain simple content that kids can understand, even if it's not meant for them. The rest of the results are famous sites that aren't written for kids at all, and may contain content that's hard for them to grasp, but they will all be filtered and safe.

Aside from this, most results on Kiddle contain big thumbails to help kids figure out what a page is about (since they don't read as well or fast as adults), and privacy is protected since the logs are deleted every 24 hours. Finally, if you try to search for a blocked word (such as "naked" or "death"), Kiddle asks you to try again due to bad words.

Nothing can replace proper parental supervision, but Kiddle is a great way to help keep kids safe online.

What do you think of Kiddle's approach to child-friendly search? If you've got any tips on keeping kids safe online, we'd love to hear them!

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