FAQ: Norton Safe Search

Norton Safe Search is Norton's secure search engine that protects users from visiting phishing and other risky sites that may appear in search results. It uses Norton's Safe Web technology, which rates 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 search.norton.com.

Is Norton Safe Search different than Bing, Yahoo, or Google search?

Norton Safe Search works like your current search engine, but with an added layer of security. You can use Norton Safe Search to find YouTube videos, Maps, Shopping results on Amazon, Info on Wikipedia and more, while easily differentiating safe Internet websites from potentially malicious ones through the visible site annotations on the toolbar or in the search results.

How does Norton Safe Search know if a website is risky?

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 also benefits from a network of more than 20 million Norton Community Watch endpoints 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 endpoints, Norton Safe Web also actively crawls the web and performs thorough analysis on millions of websites.

What languages is Norton Safe Search available for?

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

Does Norton Safe Search annotate all search results?

With the correct extension installed, all search results (both paid and non-paid) are annotated to indicate whether a search result is or may contain potentially malicious content.

Are my search activities tracked through Norton Safe Search?

We take protecting your data privacy seriously. Our detailed privacy policy can be viewed here.

Why is Norton Safe Search added to the list of search providers on my browser?

Based on consumer feedback we've learned that many users prefer to use the search box that is part of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. By adding Norton Safe Search to the list of 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 without your permission.