Safe Search: Dedicated IP's

_-chrismec-_

Have safe search available through dedicated IP addresses. Any traffic through those IP's are automatically "SafeSearch".

Hello, brand new user and liking what I see so far. Thank you for this!

In an effort to shield my small children from the onslaught of inappropriate material on the internet, my home network intercepts all google traffic and redirects it through their dedicated "Safe Search" ip's. It is not perfect of course, but it works very well for google traffic. I'm not yet sure how Kagi's SafeSearch works, but if it does not use dedicated IP's it would be a very nice feature to have in my opinion.

Thank you : )

Vlad

_-chrismec-_ Hey there

Can you extrapolate the idea a little bit? In terms of what is Kagi doing wrong right now.

Kagi has by default SafeSearch ON everywhere. You can not even turn it off for images/videos.

In the future we will have Kagi for Kids which will further allow you to assign certain "lenses" as a parent tor kids to use.

_-chrismec-_

Hi Vlad,

It seems that right now, safesearch is a setting that any user can turn off. If my kids get on kagi and wanna look up sites that offer inappropriate material, they can simply turn off safe search in the settings and be provided links. It is great that safesearch cannot be turned off for image and video searches ( i didnt realize that ), but a preview of explicit images and videos can still be seen on the web results page, in addition to the explicit search result links. Granted the images are blurred, which is a great idea, but the scenes can still be made out. It is easy to see through the blurred images exactly what someone is doing to someone.

It would be great if there were specific domains or ip's, maybe like safe.kagi.com or similar, where safe search could not be turned off at all.

Vlad

_-chrismec-_ We plan to approach this on per account setting.

basically once we have family plan out, and you make your kids accounts and mark them as kids, you will have a control over safesearch and even be able to specify the context of their results - entire web or just defined lenses.

I have three kids, they are the reason I made Kagi, so am approaching this very motivated.

_-chrismec-_

What is to prevent the kids from just creating their own free basic plan? If I were a kid that is exactly what I would do when presented with filtered results, create my own free account.

At the home router level, I'm not sure how I can prevent that. Maybe dnsmasq and some scripting can force kagi traffic to a kagi account, but i'm not sure what that would look like atm...

*** Also, it looks like safe search can now be turned off for images. I just tried a search for "ti***es" and was presented with the usual unblurred images.

Probably not appropriate to put here, but I just signed up for premium. I think what you are doing is awesome!

Browsing6853

I think the solution would be using a special subdomain like kids.kagi.com so you can apply some classic and easy DNS filtering?

_-chrismec-_

Yes I think so too. Dedicated domains or ip's where there is no way safe search can be turned off at all. Google does this well. Bing and Duck also do it, but set the safe search to moderate (afaik) rather than strict. This way if a child just created their own free account then they would not be able to see adult content. Or maybe it would be easier to just set all free accounts to strict safe search across the board.

z64

Or maybe it would be easier to just set all free accounts to strict safe search across the board.

I think this could be a good idea, regardless of any other action we take for kids accounts.

Maybe in addition, we could disable the sign-out button on a Kids account, and the Kids account session must be managed from some kind of Parental Controls panel.

Then the only way to break out would be to clear the browser's cookies - if a kid knows how to do that, I would expect them to be able to change kids.kagi.com -> kagi.com.

IP filtering

I don't think this is feasible. How would we prevent it from being misused, i.e. someone going to a public or business network and blocking safe search toggle for everyone? It would have to be coupled with / only applied to Kids accounts, but this isn't exactly bulletproof either..

Browsing6853

z64 I would expect them to be able to change kids.kagi.com -> kagi.com.

The point is that with this setting the parents could just block the domain "kagi.com" from being resolved at all and adding kids.kagi.com to the domain whitelist. DNS blocking it's probably the most popular way of controlling the web access out there. The other ideas you said like disabling sign-out look interesting too.

z64

The point is that with this setting the parents could just block the domain "kagi.com" from being resolved at all and adding kids.kagi.com to the domain whitelist.

Ok, understood. This sounds like it could work, and maybe we can do this too, but we should aim for something more accessible as the primary offering. My parents have no idea what DNS is 😃

_-chrismec-_

but we should aim for something more accessible as the primary offering. My parents have no idea what DNS is

For me, if I am to allow the general use of kagi in the home, then the safe search option will need to be something that mostly just works and cannot be easily bypassed. Dedicated ips or domains are the most accessible way of doing this in a way that will work. In the end, I think, the primary users of forced safe search, will be enterprise users who have a legal or business need to fulfill, not parents and grandparents. It would be great if you could make safer internet as easy as turning on the kitchen light, but that is not reality. I think in general, as long as free accounts can access everything, then account level controls will not work.

Vlad

Can we summarize the ask(s)?

Browsing6853

Vlad People want to make harder to bypass safe search. Possibilities:

Special Kagi server ip addresses (e.g. every google search to IP addresses 216.239.38.120 have forced safe search). (OP's original request)
Special subdomain with forced safe search (e.g. kids.kagi.com)
Kids account with disabled sign-out button

(1) and (2) imply a external control over the DNS. Note you can assume the parents are probably already blocking Google before trying to block Kagi (no reason to use a super restrictive Kagi account while the kid could just access google.com)

MagicMouse

I realise that this thread is almost a year old, but I just wanted to bump it back up. Being able to enforce safe search at the network level (through, for e.g., dnsmasq) would be very helpful. I currently do this for all search engines that provide safe search domains or ip addresses and block all other search engines.

Me

Is it possible for you to liaise with Nextdns so that by default if Nextdns is being used and safesearch is enabled kagi is also automatically returning safesearch results. Nextdns support Google safesearch etc and block all SEs that do not support safesearch

Nition

+1 from me for this request as well.

All other major search engines already allow for a DNS-based safe search enforcement. This allows other tools to then use that same method. For instance if you use NextDNS as your DNS provider, you can enable a Safe Search option that enforces Safe Search on all search engines when on the network. That prevents anyone being able to just switch to a different account to bypass settings - the option to turn of safe search just completely goes away. But it isn't possible for Kagi at the moment.

Vlad

Nition

All other major search engines already allow for a DNS-based safe search enforcement.

Can you share bit more on this? I never heard about this feature.

Nition

Vlad Sorry for the super slow response.

So for instance Google has forcesafesearch.google.com. Bing has strict.bing.com. Those addresses have SafeSearch always on.

If you then reroute the google.com IP to go to the forcesafeseach.google.com IP (or you have your DNS provider do it via some sort of parental controls they might have), now your children or whatever can't just go and turn SafeSearch off.