Understanding Safe Search

This section describes the processing flow of safe search.

Safe search is a function of a search engine that automatically filters pornographic contents and potential attack traffic. To regulate Internet access behavior, you can enable safe search on the FW for all Internet access users. After safe search is enabled on the FW, the safe search function will be enforced forcibly for Bing, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, and YouTube.

The processing flow of safe search begins after the processing flow of URL filtering is complete. After URL filtering is complete, all search requests excluding whitelisted or blocked requests are processed as follows. For details, see Figure 1:

Figure 1 Processing flow of safe search

1. The FW checks whether safe search is enabled.

   • If no, the action of a matching URL filtering rule is taken on requests.
   • If yes, further detection is performed.

2. The FW extracts the host in a search request and check whether the request belongs to Bing, Google, Yahoo, Yandex, or YouTube.

   • If no, the request is permitted.

   • If yes, further detection is performed.

3. The FW checks whether the search request carries a safe search tag.

   • If safe search is enabled in the browser and the request carries the safe search tag, the request is permitted.
   • If the request does not carry the safe search tag, the FW adds the tag to the request.
4. The FW sends the search request carries the safe search tag to the search engine server.