What is Kiddle?
Kiddle (www.kiddle.co) is a free child-friendly search engine website for searching the web that is powered by Google.
Notable Features
Whitelist: Kiddle uses a whitelist to filter results that come from Google, which, in my opinion, is safer than the blacklist approached employed by a similar search engine called Swiggle. Kiddle's developers manually curated a list of kid-friendly websites, such as National Geographic Kids (www.natgeokids.com), so that ONLY approved websites can appear in its results. Of course, this means that for normal people, this search engine is completely useless. Notably, Wikipedia isn't whitelisted. You can't find any single result from Wikipedia on Kiddle. For a normal search engine, that would be insane, but for Kiddle, that's good, actually. Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, it's just not possible to guarantee that Wikipedia's articles are going to be child-friendly. The same can be said about any social media website where anyone can post, and any online forum.
Child-friendly Wikipedia: Kiddle has maintains its own copy of the Wikipedia, which it called Kiddle Encyclopedia. It's available at kids.kiddle.co. According to the message on its footer: "Kiddle encyclopedia articles are based on selected content and facts from Wikipedia, edited or rewritten for children." This is perfectly fine, as Wikipedia legally allows this sort of thing. All content on the Kiddle Encyclopedia is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, which is something that any copy of the Wikipedia would have to do as well.
Child-friendly ranking: Kiddle ranks websites that are targeted at kids higher than websites with expert content that are targeted at adults1. This means that the first results will likely be something a child can read and understand.
Keyword blocking: Kiddle won't search for certain unsafe words. This feature is blacklist-based.
Observations
Ads: Kiddle is monetized through ads, as ads from Google can be found on its encyclopedia, although they seem to be missing from its search results page. This is rather unfortunate, as I don't think they can fully control what ads appear on the website. For instance, I did see an ad that seemed to be targeted at kids, featuring a cartoon character promoting a "fun mind games" website, but what is more weird were all the ads that are clearly not targeted at children, but at businesses. I saw ads for a CRM, to manage customers. I don't think a child would purchase that service. In fact, I'm not sure anyone paying money to display ads would want their ads to be shown to children, unless they're very evil people. So maybe ads aren't a very good idea for a child-friendly website, and it would be much better if they moved to another monetization model, such as paid subscription. It seems to be working for Kagi, but then again, I'm not sure Google would like that, considering Kiddle's results are powered by Google. Can you take Google's results and just sell them? Who knows!
References
- https://www.kiddle.co/kidssafesearch.php (accessed 2024-04-30) ↩︎
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