Web Search Help

Search Preferences

We want your web search to be exactly the way you want it. Here's a quick review of the search options you can set (and, of course, revise whenever you like) on your Google Preferences page.

SafeSearch filtering
Language options
Number of results
New results window

SafeSearch filtering

Many users prefer not to have adult sites included in search results (especially if kids use the same computer). Google's SafeSearch screens for sites that contain explicit sexual content and deletes them from your search results. No filter is 100 percent accurate, but SafeSearch should eliminate most inappropriate material.

You can choose from among three SafeSearch settings:

Moderate filtering excludes most explicit images from Google Image Search results but doesn't filter ordinary web search results. This is your default SafeSearch setting; you'll receive moderate filtering unless you change it.
Strict filtering applies SafeSearch filtering to all your search results (i.e. both image search and ordinary web search).
No filtering, as you've probably figured out, turns off SafeSearch filtering completely.

You can also adjust your SafeSearch settings on the Advanced Search or the Advanced Image Search pages on a per search basis.

We do our best to keep SafeSearch as up-to-date and comprehensive as possible, but inappropriate sites will sometimes slip through the cracks. If you have SafeSearch activated and still find websites containing offensive content in your results, please visit our webpage removal request tool to tell us about the site or image you found.

For more pointers on keeping your family safe on the web, please read Google's Tips for Online Safety.

Language options

The value of search is universal, but when it comes to languages, universality means getting specific. Our language search feature lets you search for webpages in the language that you choose. Because these searches only see part of the Web, we suggest setting "Search Web pages written in any language" as your default option. Specifying a language can be useful, however, when you want to find content in a particular tongue.

You can also set your preferences to show you the Google homepage, site messages, and buttons in a specific language.

List of interface languages for Google.com

If your own preferred language isn't listed, we encourage you to help us add it to Google by joining our volunteer translator program.

Finally, this isn't on the preferences page, but while we're talking languages, we thought we'd mention that our translation software can translate sites published in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese into English. Interested? Check out our Language Tools.

Number of results

Unless you change this preference, you'll see 10 search results per page. We set it this way because this produces the fastest response time. But if you want to see more results per page, you can increase the number to 20, 30, 50 or 100.

New results window

Ordinarily, when you search with Google, your search page is replaced by a search results page. If you'd prefer to keep your main search page open, you can set this preference option to open your search results in a new browser window.