Every time you open a page, Safe View makes a quick decision: let it load, or block it. It happens in a fraction of a second, entirely inside your browser. Here’s how that decision is made.
The order of checks
Safe View works through its rules in a fixed order, and stops at the first one that decides:
- Your whitelist. If the site is on your whitelist, it’s allowed. Always.
- Your blocklist sites. Sites you’ve added yourself are blocked.
- Known adult sites. A built-in list of adult websites.
- Your blocklist keywords, found in the address.
- Adult keywords in the site’s name, such as a domain built around an explicit word.
Together, the built-in lists hold over 1,000 adult sites and keywords. If none of these decide, the address alone isn’t enough, and Safe View looks at the page itself.
Why only the site’s name? Because a word like “porn” in the rest of an address is ambiguous. It might be an adult page, but it’s just as likely to be a recovery community, a help article about quitting, a news story or an encyclopedia entry. Blocking all of those would get in the way of exactly the people Safe View is for. So when an adult keyword appears only in a page path or a search, Safe View lets the page check decide from what the page actually contains. Keywords you add to your own blocklist are different: they block anywhere in the address, because you chose them.
The smart page check
Lists can’t keep up with every new site. So for pages that aren’t on any list, Safe View reads the parts of the page that describe it: the title, the description, the headings, image descriptions and the visible text.
Where a word appears matters. A word in the title says a lot about a page; the same word buried in a comment says much less. So Safe View scores each adult keyword by the strongest place it appears, counting each keyword once. One word alone doesn’t block a page, which is why a news article about online safety, or a health page, stays readable. A page that’s clearly adult, with several adult terms in its title and description, is blocked.
Some pages fill in their content after they first load. Safe View checks once when the page is ready, and again shortly after, to catch those.
Pages that label themselves adult
Many adult sites voluntarily tag their own pages with an adult-content rating. When Safe View finds one of those labels, it blocks the page, even if no keywords match.
Cleaner search results
On search pages, blocking the whole results page would get in the way. Instead, on Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo, Safe View hides individual adult results and thumbnails, including ones that load as you scroll. It looks at where each result actually leads, and at its title and snippet.
Separately, Safe View switches Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Facebook search to their strict safe-search modes.
Your own rules
You know your weak spots better than any list. You can add any website or keyword to your blocklist, and any site or keyword you need to your whitelist. The whitelist always wins, and changes take effect the next time a page loads.
All of it stays on your device
Every check above runs inside your browser. Safe View never sends the websites you visit, your keywords, or anything you type. Read more in is your porn blocker private?
When something gets it wrong
No blocker is perfect. If a page you need is blocked, add it to your whitelist. If something gets through that shouldn’t, add the site or a keyword to your blocklist. For the step-by-step setup, see how to block porn on Chrome.
