Sep 11

Kiddle, the Google for Kids

Concerns arise for all parents at some point about the potential danger of misuse of the Internet by our children.

Luckily today there are different types of parental controls, such as blocking certain elements in apps, such as purchases or advertising. There are also tools like Kiddle that help us make the use of the Internet by our young children safer.

Kiddle is a Google for kids, a children’s search engine that works in a similar way but exclusively has content and sources that can be consulted by all audiences. With it, the little ones will be able to get acquainted with the Internet without encountering potential dangers when they are satisfying their curiosity.

How it’s presented

to get Kiddle the children’s search engine, you do not need to download or much less install anything, you just need to access: https://www.kiddle.co/

A robot and a lunar landscape welcome the little ones to Kiddle, in a super-simple interface, consisting of a search bar that will help minors safely browse the Internet.

Usually Kiddle stands out for displaying a large, easy-to-understand font. It uses the Arial font in a large size in search results in order to facilitate readability by children.

Large thumbnail images are also used to make it easy to access content when kids haven’t read yet. According to the website itself, this will make it easier to scan the results and differentiate them and will function as visual cues for children who do not read as fast as adults.

The Kpedia is basically an encyclopedia created directly by Kiddle, which has more than 700,000 articles so that the little ones can research on different topics. As soon as we click on the Kpedia we will see a list of available topics, ranging from Chemistry and Physics, to History and Literature. The Kimages section allows direct access to the images stored in the Kpedia.

Keep in mind that it is not Google that is behind this browser. The Kiddle website explains that it works through Google Safe Search, but its creators are not affiliated with Google Inc.

How it works, Kiddle features

It consists of a visual search engine for children that works with editors and google safe search for children, allows children to do a web search, images, news or videos.

Once a child enters a query in the search bar, Kiddle will open a list of related links. The first one to three results will include secure sites and pages written specifically for children that publishers select and control by hand.

The next four to seven results will include sites that include content written in simple language so young children can understand what they’re researching. These are also carefully selected and reviewed by publishers. Eighth results go on include sites written for adults that are still filtered by Google’s secure search. However, they are a little harder for children to understand.

Something to keep in mind that Kiddle is not in Spanish, it is in English, and the results of the searches you perform will also be displayed in this language. Although it allows them to search with keywords in other languages, their results are still in English.

We mustn’t neglect ourselves

As most children start searching their parents’ phones, tablets and laptops before getting their own devices, this is where the safest search is most important.

Children are exposed to the Internet at younger and younger ages and to the content found on the World Wide Web, so having a child-friendly search engine or a child-friendly and carefully monitored search engine can be a huge advantage as long as we don’t neglect supervision.

Kiddle is a child-oriented search engine, but parents and educators cannot set aside children’s use of the Internet. So that they can guide them and help them learn and satisfy their curiosity, the search engine has a tip section for adults.

The focus should be on educating children about responsible Internet use and how to use tools like Kiddle, YouTube Kids and other child-friendly apps, while ensuring that there are so many reasonable restrictions.

Keep the computer in a family room, set up children’s login/user accounts, protect yours. Disabling the Internet on devices at a certain time, using Internet parental controls and mobile phone providers, and changing passwords for the devices that control them are just some of the things that can help.

For example, on top of all these results you’ll see a perfectly differentiated gray box in which the advertising content will appear. This is usually well selected, although it may contain pages that may not have passed the web filter as a normal result.

Privacy and security policies

Kiddle’s website ensures that no personally identifiable information is collected; In addition, records are deleted every 24 hours. In this sense, you also do not need to register to use the search engine.

What they do accept is that they use cookies to personalize user content and ads. Yes, as I said earlier, search results offer ads. This is an aspect I think is ideal, considering that it is focused on children.

If you think there are any inappropriate words that haven’t been blocked with the Kiddle filter, you can access a form to request the blocking of certain keywords.

For younger children who need to be online but are too young to leave on their own devices, and for parents and educators who want little ones to easily avoid inappropriate content for their age, these search engines are a pretty useful tool.

However, for older children, the results in these search engines may be too restrictive to be useful. They will probably only frustrate children to use other means.

So for older children it can be combined with some other tools that give you a greater margin when researching, while still being protected by the dangers of internet misuse. We’ll talk about it in another post.

All the information we give you in this article is indicative as each child and each family is different and unique.