Enforce Safe Search on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo for Anyone on Your Wi-Fi Network

Michael Mason

Last Update 4 months ago

If you have set up your router to exclusively use FreeFiltering's "Standard DNS Servers", you can enforce "Safe Search" for any user who is connected to your Wi-Fi network when they conduct searches on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. (Premium members can also enforce "Safe Search" on individual devices, even when the device is "away from home", using a cell connection.)


Enforcing "Safe Search" means the user will not be able to toggle "Safe Search" OFF using the controls that normally appear on the search engine page. (DuckDuckGo lets the user toggle "Safe Search" OFF, but the change is not accepted even though it appears to be saved. We are still enforcing their Safe Search domains in the background.)


Here's an example of the message someone might see if you're enforcing "Safe Search" and they attempt to turn it off:


1) Google:

2) Bing:
3) DuckDuckGo - for DuckDuckGo, it will appear to allow you to toggle their "Safe Search" OFF. You can even click "Save". But this does nothing... Safe Search will still be enforced.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please keep in mind that each search engine has built their own "Safe Search" product and the results you get when conducting searches will depend on how the search engine company has defined "safe" according to their algorithms. Typically, the "safe" version for their search results will prevent links to explicit websites from being returned on the search page. But their definition of "safe" will not be the same as ours, so some searches may return content that the search engine does not deem "objectionable".

We hear from some users that they are still able to search the "images" sections of the major search engines and find inappropriate results. Unfortunately, there is no way for us to prevent that from occurring via DNS blocking.

For those who struggle with a temptation to abuse "image search", please consider Plucky, a service which helps to completely remove images from your web-browsing experience.

Watch this video to see how Safe Search works.

We highly recommend the Swisscows search engine - they do not even offer an "unsafe" version of their search engine, and they also attempt to limit inappropriate images from being displayed in "image searches".

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