While your grandparents had to flip through books and other printed materials to find information, everything you now need (and more) is just a few clicks away. You don’t need to spend hours buried in a tower of books researching the history of the American frontier or consulting a pile of cookbooks from the library to plan your meals. Whenever you need to know something, you can simply grab your phone or go to your computer and get the necessary details in seconds. The best part is that search engines like Google not only make it quick, but also very easy to get information. Their interfaces are designed to be quite intuitive, so that almost anyone can use them, even children.

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However, the ability to quickly and easily access information is a double-edged sword. Not everything found online is necessarily useful, and many are not suitable for children. Fortunately, there are several parental control features and apps on Android, iPhone, and computers that you can rely on to keep your little ones safe. You can also choose to switch to a child-friendly search engine, including Kiddle. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at what Kiddle is and whether it’s connected to Google. We also tested the search engine to help you decide if it’s right for your kids.

Kiddle is a child-friendly alternative search engine for Google. Since it is specifically created for children, it only allows search queries and search results that are safe for family consumption. This means that you cannot use sexually obscene language, profanity, violence, and other adult themes as a search query, nor will these topics appear in Kiddle search results. If you try to search for something inappropriate, you’ll only get an “Oops, try again!” error. Kiddle achieves this safe environment for children in three ways. First, it blocks certain keywords and sites, making them unavailable for use in the search query. Kiddle blocks typical explicit language, as well as social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp. Second, Kiddle uses Google SafeSearch, which automatically filters and blocks explicit content from appearing in search results. And finally, the top search results on Kiddle (normally on pages one through seven) are pre-checked by a team of editors to ensure they are intended for children.

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Besides providing only kid-friendly web pages, Kiddle also offers other great features. It includes its own version of Wikipedia called Kpedia, whose content is chosen and rewritten from Wikipedia. You can also use Kiddle to search for images, either on the web or on Kpedia. In addition to the default English version, Kiddle also comes in a Spanish edition for web and image searches. However, it does not have a dedicated Kpedia tab. You will first need to search in the web tab, and if your query has a page in the Spanish version of Kpedia, it will appear in the search results.

At a glance, it’s easy to assume that Kiddle is a Google product since it uses almost the same color scheme for its logo, just in a slightly different shade. The name “Kiddle” also sounds like a cute pun on “Google”, which could indicate the relationship between the two. However, even if Kiddle uses Google SafeSearch, it is not owned or connected to Google. It is an entirely separate company.

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Kiddle is different from Google in many ways. First of all, its user interface is designed to be as kid-friendly as possible. This means a minimalist style with an enlarged Arial font to make content easier to read and navigate. Kiddle’s list of search results is also simpler than Google’s. Rather than including additional sections such as Learn More/About, People Also Ask, and AI Response, Kiddle keeps it simple by providing only a “featured result” (a page taken from Kpedia) and a list handpicked and filtered sites. It also moved web page thumbnails to the left and enlarged them for better visual cues.

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Kiddle automatically blocks inappropriate words and queries, and the results are prioritized so that the top three results come from a set of pages written specifically for kids and verified by real humans. The following results will not be specifically written with children in mind, but will always come from this pre-checked pool. Results from eight will rely solely on SafeSearch and blocking.

Overall, This gives your child an almost completely safe searching experience. The same cannot be said for Google, even if you enable Google SafeSearch. SafeSearch simply blocks explicit websites from the results, but other pages inappropriate for children may still appear.

Another area where Kiddle differs from Google is in its privacy policy. Unlike Google, which exists to harvest user data, Kiddle says it doesn’t collect personally identifiable information (PII) and that it deletes server logs every 24 hours.

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This does not mean that your child’s data is safe. Kiddle relies on Google cookies and serves personalized Google ads.

We tested Kiddle to see how well it works as a search engine for your kids. First, we tried searching for restricted terms like swearing and adult content. Kiddle does a solid job of blocking popular keywords that kids might try to search for. Kiddle is also good at banning social media sites. It does not provide a direct link to most sites like Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat, but returns some search results on these sites. YouTube, on the other hand, is completely banned and shows you the message “Oops, try again.” However, your children can still watch videos if the clips are embedded on authorized websites like ed.ted.com and khanacademy.org.

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When it comes to homework-related queries, Kiddle has adequate resources, including Kpedia, for generic K-12 subjects like animals, holidays, and math problems. However, this might be too limited for high school students. We tried entering keywords like “Emily Dickinson poems,” “economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic,” and “HTML” but they didn’t return many useful results.

We also tried search terms that we thought were appropriate for an eight-year-old. A search for “Fastest Motorcycle” returned no results, while “Ho Chi Minh City” led us to the question “Oops, try again!” » page. This is not something you would expect for a capital city. Diving further, it didn’t yield any results when we looked at the lyrics of Let It Go from Frozen, Luzon Datum of 1911 (a historical landmark in a small province in the Philippines), and biophilic design (architectural design focused on nature). Overall, Kiddle’s usefulness is extremely limited as a true search engine for kids, making it more like a large, organized encyclopedia..

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Although the topics and keywords you can search on Kiddle are very limited, there are approved websites you can use to play online games like tic-tac-toe and word shake.

If you want your kids to start using Kiddle instead of Google for their online searches, you can easily set Kiddle as default search engine in Chrome. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do this on desktop and mobile devices (Android and iOS):

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1. On computer:
   1. Launch Chrome.
   2. Click the Plus icon (three vertical dots) in the upper right corner.
   3. Go to Settings.
   4. Select Search Engine from the left side panel.
   5. Next to Site Search, tap Add.
   6. Fill in the fields with these details:
      1. Name: Kiddle
      2. Shortcut: kiddle
      3. URL: https://www.kiddle.co/s.php?q=%s
   7. Tap Save to add Kiddle as a search engine.
   8. Click the Plus icon next to the newly added Kiddle entry.
   9. Choose Set as Default.
   10. Try typing a query into Chrome’s address bar. It should automatically use Kiddle instead of Google.
2. On mobile:
   1. Go to m.kiddle.co on your Chrome app.
   2. Use the search engine at least three times (i.e. search for three topics).
   3. Tap the Plus icon in the upper right corner of the screen for Android or the lower right for iOS.
   4. Go to Settings > Search Engine.
   5. Under Recently Visited, select kiddle.co. If you can’t find this option, use the Kiddle site several times.
   6. Type any search query in the address bar. You should be redirected to the Kiddle search results.

It is important to note, however, that using Kiddle as your default search engine will not prevent your children from typing websites blocked by Kiddle into the browser’s address bar.