Some search engines are better than others for various purposes.  For more information see Search Engines.  There some things that you can do with most search engines to make your experience more useful and appropriate.

Settings for your Search Engine

There is one important thing to keep in mind.  The search engine definition of "inappropriate" is probably not the same as yours.  They don't filter religious content, nor do they have the same standards of tznius.

Google

All the Google pages are text, including the advertisements.   The advertisements are well marked, and most of them are on the side.  Fortunately, they are also generally very relevant to the search you put in, so you can minimize problems by being judicious about your searches.  There is little to adjust beyond this.  However, there is one setting that you should change.  On the right of the search box you will see a link for preferences.  Click on that.  In the the third box on the resulting page you will see SafeSearch filtering.   The default only filters images.  Change it to "strict" filtering, to filter text as well.  And, make sure that you have "cookies" enabled in your browser.

Yahoo

The only way to change the settings for Yahoo is to use the "My Yahoo" feature.  To use it, click on the My Yahoo button on the upper left hand corner of the page, just below the the Yahoo! logo.  You will need to create a login with a password, which will enable you to keep your settings.  Once you are signed in, you can choose to personalize your page.

The main thing you want to do is to go to Content; Add Module.  Actually, you will probably want to remove some content, but this is where you go to do that.  For instance, under "MY Yahoo! Essentials" you will find several modules that are already included.  You can remove all of them, or just some of them.    Unfortunately, you cannot get rid of everything that might be problematic, but this does get the biggest problems out of center stage.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to filter results.  That means you need to be extra careful with searches.

 

Lycos

Unfortunately, at this point, Lycos does not offer any filtering or customization.  Use with caution.

 

Alta Vista

The basic AltaVista search page is text based, as is the results page.  However, the "sponsored matches", which are actually links that have paid for placement, are not well marked.  There is a heading that shows the "sponsored matches", but it's extremely easy to miss, because it's in light grey.   The "sponsored" matches are primarily on the the top, so you can find the real search results by going down the list until you find the (light grey) line that indicates how many results Alta Vista has found.  There is also a "family filter".  If you are in a page of search results, you can set it  by clicking on that phrase in the upper right hand corner of the page.  If you are on the Alta Vista home page, click on "settings" to the right of the "find" button.  For the greatest safety, set the filter to filter all content, not just multimedia.  You can also set a password, so that a child using this on his own cannot turn the filtering off.  In addition, set the search engine to show a description of each site that is returned in a search.  This way, you will be better able to avoid clicking on inappropriate links (which may come up even with filtering.)

 

Ask (formerly AskJeeves)

Turn the AskEraser on.  This won't prevent inappropriate content but will leave a little less information about your searches on the web.   Under options you can choose "Content Filtering".  Ask.com pops up a box warning that they do not guarantee that all inappropriate content will be blocked.

Ask For Kids

The site is designed for children, but there are no settings that parents can control. 

This is not an exhaustive list. If you know of any other search engines that you think should be included here, please email me at kayza dot zajac at gmail dot com (replacing the words "at" and "dot" with the signs).