Norton Safe Search

Norton Safe Search is Norton’s secure search engine that helps protect users from visiting phishing and other risky sites that may appear in search results. It uses Norton’s Safe Web technology, along with the Ask.com search engine, to rate websites according to their safety. Norton Safe Search is included in Norton’s security products offered online or in retail. You can also use it by visiting www.safesearch.ask.com  

Norton Safe Search works like most search engines, but with an added layer of security. You can use Norton Safe Search to perform your online searches while easily differentiating safe Internet websites from potentially harmful ones through the visible security ratings on the toolbar or in the search results.  

In order to rate websites, Norton Safe Search uses a technology called Norton Safe Web, which performs thorough analysis using signature-based file scanning, intrusion detection engines, behavioral detection, and install/uninstall analysis to identify security risks such as phishing sites, malicious downloads, browser exploits and links to unsafe external sites.

Norton Safe Web benefits from a network of more than 20 million Norton Community Watch end-points that automatically submit in real-time suspicious URLs to the Norton Safe Web server for detailed analysis. This allows Norton Safe Web to quickly hone in on newly infected sites.

In addition to analyzing suspicious sites submitted by Norton end-points, Norton Safe Web also actively crawls the Web and performs thorough analysis on millions of Web sites.

Norton Safe Search is available in Danish, German, Spanish, Finnish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish, and English language sites.  

When enabled, the Norton Safe Search Unsafe Site Filtering feature removes unsafe non-paid search results. This feature does not provide a security rating for paid search results (sponsored links) nor does it filter out potentially unsafe sponsored links from the search results. For sponsored links, the Norton toolbar will allow you to view the security rating for such site.  

When you submit a search query through Norton Safe Search, it will be directed to Ask.com where your query is processed and the search results are provided. As part of your use of Norton Safe Search, Ask.com may collect and/or ask you to provide certain information. Please see the Ask.com Privacy Policy located here for details on the type of information collected, how Ask.com uses and protects the collected information, and who it may share such information with.

Based on consumer feedback, we’ve learned that many users prefer to use the search box that is part of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. By adding Norton Safe Search to the list of available search providers, users can select to search using Norton Safe Search if they choose. We do not make any changes to your default search provider setting without your permission.