Norton Safe Search

Norton Safe Search is a search engine focused on online security that helps protect users from visiting phishing and other risky sites that may appear in search results. It uses Norton Safe Web technology to rate websites according to their safety. Norton Safe Search is included in Norton protection plans offered online or in retail. Norton Safe Search is not exclusively available in Norton protection plans; it is also available online for free. You can also install it by visiting the Norton Safe Search install page.

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 millions of 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 crawls the Web and performs thorough analysis on millions of Web sites.

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

When enabled, the Norton Safe Search Unsafe Site Filtering feature² helps remove unsafe non-paid search results that it detects. 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.¹ 

When you submit a search query through Norton Safe Search, it will be directed to Ask.com or Yahoo.com (Search Partners) where your query is processed, and the search results are provided. Norton Safe Search does not provide any information about you to our Search Partners. As part of your use of Norton Safe Search, Search Partners may collect and/or ask you to provide certain information. Please see the Search Partners Privacy Policies located here for Ask.com and here for Yahoo.com for details on the type of information collected, how our Search Partners uses and protects the collected information, and who it may share such information with.