The features described in this article were added to Pluckeye in v1.0.10, so they won’t work in earlier versions.

Overview

Safe browsing, safe searching, and Pluckeye.

Pluckeye has 2 generic “safe” options for enabling various safe browsing options on the Internet.

safe

Enable most “safe” browsing technologies.

safer

Enable even “safer” browsing technologies.

The above are intentionally generic so that end-users who don’t care about the details can specify one of the above and get what they get. To use one of these features, just enable it at the command line, like so:

  pluck + safer

These generic options may include technologies that allow third parties (such as Google) to observe your browsing. If this concerns you, see the privacy section below.

It is worth noting that most “safe” options take precedence over all Pluckeye’s allow rules, including allow everything.

TL;DR

If you want “smart filtering”, use pluck + safe.

If the result filters too much of youtube, use pluck + unsafeyoutube.

If the result filters too little of youtube, use pluck + safer.

If you are zealous about privacy read more about pluck + unsafesites.

Details

Pluckeye has 5 primitive “safe” options that correspond to various safe searching options on the Internet.

safegoogle

safe searching on google

safeplease

safe searching wherever possible

safesites

ask Google if a site is “safe”

safeyoutube

safe searching on youtube

saferyoutube

strict searching on youtube

Each of these has a corresponding “unsafe” option that can be specified as well.

unsafegoogle

un-safegoogle

unsafeplease

un-safeplease

unsafesites

un-safesites

unsafeyoutube

un-safeyoutube

unsaferyoutube

un-saferyoutube

The generic options are a handy way to enable many specific ones.

safe

safegoogle + safeplease + safesites + safeyoutube

safer

safe + saferyoutube

Privacy and unsafesites

First, a word of warning. Before you conclude that you would never, under any circumstances, allow Google any chance to know what sites you visit, consider 3 things.

1. Do you use https://www.google.com/ for search? Maybe Google already knows what sites you visit.
2. What do you fear would happen, realistically, if Google did know everything about your Internet use?
3. Consider for a moment how much you value your privacy, and how much you value the filtering that safe browsing can provide. Do not succumb to a privacy-is-everything knee-jerk reaction without giving due consideration to what’s really valuable for your life.

Having said that, if you want safe search, but you do not want Google involved, do this:

  pluck + safe
  pluck + unsafesites

Other recommended settings

duckduckgo

If you’d like to force strict search on https://duckduckgo.com/ :

   pluck + block duckduckgo.com text/html
   pluck + allow safe.duckduckgo.com text/html

or, if you want images and video:

   pluck + block duckduckgo.com text/html
   pluck + allow safe.duckduckgo.com

If you want this to be your default search engine in Chrome, see how-to-set-default-search-engine-in-chrome.