Articles on: Technical documentation

Why doesn't Safe Surfer report on search terms entered into search engines?

Safe Surfer uses a computer networking system called DNS to perform network filtering. This is a highly practical and efficient way for us to provide you with comprehensive control over a majority of the content available on the Internet (including both websites and apps). DNS operates on a domain-based system (for example, processing "my.safesurfer.io") rather than a URL-based system (for example, processing "https://my.safesurfer.io/devices"). Due to this, we are unable to process search terms entered into search engines. Although, we always process domains, so websites that are attempted to be accessed will always be filtered by us.

When a protected user searches for something in a search engine that supports a SafeSearch filtering system, such as Google or Bing, it will redirect that search request through its automated SafeSearch system. This attempts to hide explicit content in search, image, and video results.

You can block search engines that don't support this feature by blocking the "Unsafe search engines" category on the Blocking menu. In addition, YouTube supports a feature similar to SafeSearch where we can apply either a "moderate" or "strict" level of filtering for a device. You can find the YouTube filter settings under the Filtering section on the Blocking menu.

Updated on: 18/03/2024

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