My wife informed me this morning that someone had commented on a site she visits regularly that Google is now providing a kid-friendly version of its search engine, Kiddle. I hadn't heard of the site and checked to see who had registered kiddle.com using the Whois site provided by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which allows you to view publicly available information for a domain registrant. The Kiddle.com entry showed that domain is registered to someone in Texas in the U.S. who registered the domain name on April 2, 2013. But the webpage for that site contains nothing but a few links to other sites. I.e., it appears to be a site registered by a domain squatter solely to buy before someone else can get it and then resale at a profit when someone else wants the domain name and in the meantime, if no one meets his price, put nothing but advertising links on it.

After a little further checking, I found that the the site for the kid-friendly search engine is Kiddle.co, i.e., there is no "m" at the end for "com". "Co" is the country code for Columbia. Each country has its own top-level domain associated with a country code. For the United States it is .us, for Canada it is .ca, for France it is .fr, for Germany it is .de, etc.

The publicly available regisration information for Kiddle can be viwed at WHOIS Result for kiddle.co, but you will see Domains By Proxy, LLC listed as the registrant, i.e., the identity of the domain name owner is not publicly available. The domain name was registered on November 1, 2014.

Someone has also registered kiddie.co, i.e. a doman with an "IE" at the end, since "kiddie" is sometimes a term applied to a young child, rather than kiddle.co with an "LE" at the end, which when typed with lower case letters also resembles kiddie, but that is just an advertising page with no content like kiddle.com.

So who owns kiddle.co, the domain name associated with the kid-friencly search engine? The BBC News article Kiddle search engine for children causes controversy, which was posted on March 1, 2016, states:

"Kiddle's parent company is not named on the website but one of its early testers blogged that it was set up by the Russian founder of a site called Freaking News."

That article mentions a complaint from an LGBT group regarding words that are blocked as search terms::

"Other words blocked by the site include lesbian and gay, a decision which has angered the campaign group Stonewall."

I presume they are referring to the group mentioned in the Wikipedia Stonewall (charity) article.

The article mentions that the response from Kiddle was "What is OK for a child of 12 may not be OK for a child of five." I don't think that is an unreasonable position, if the the site's goal is to serve as a search engine for very young children rather than adolescents or those close to adolescence.

The Kiddle home page states it is a "Visual search engine for kids, powered by editors and Google safe search." Kiddle is based on Google Custom Search, which allows anyone to create a customized search engine underpinned by Google's search eninge. According to Kiddle's privacy policy, the search engine doesn't collect any personal information and clears its logs every 24 hours.

For parents concerned about what their children may come across while surfing the web, setting Kiddle as the default search engine in browsers on systems used by their children should help reduce the likelihood that their children may encounter material that parents would prefer their children don't see. Adults also have likely encountered material they would rather not have seen, which is why you can find quite a few "eyebleach" sites on the Internet, which try to take one's mind off disgusting or horrifying images one may have seen with pleasanter ones, e.g. eyebleach.me, which offers an "antidote to the unexpected horrors and realities of the internet and the world we inhabit." The site offers the following categories:

There is also an EyeBleach subreddit on Reddit, which offers a "catch-all community for sharing links which are beautiful, happy, adorable or tastefully sexy. After a long day of seeing what internet anonymity can do to people, you're bound to need some eyebleach."

References:

  1. Kiddle search engine for children causes controversy
    By: By Zoe Kleinman, Technology reporter, BBC News
    Date: March 1, 2016
    BBC
  2. Tech Times
    By: Lauren Keating
    Date: February 25, 2016
    Tech Times
  3. This New Search Engine For Kids Means No More Finding Twerking Videos By Mistake
    By: Valerie Williams
    Date: March 28, 2016
    Scary Mommy
  4. Kiddle Is A New, Safe (ish) Search Engine For Kids
    By: Chris Jager
    Date: February 29, 2016
    lifehacker

 

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