The Kid-Friendly Search Engine That’s Not Friendly With The Truth

This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars. Since 2016, governments, media, and tech companies have warned about online disinformation targeting adults. Far less attention has been paid to the information tools increasingly shaping children, even as ...

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This piece is part of MI x DW, a collaboration that brings Daily Wire readers exclusive commentary and research from the Manhattan Institute’s world-class team of scholars.

Since 2016, governments, media, and tech companies have warned about online disinformation targeting adults. Far less attention has been paid to the information tools increasingly shaping children, even as such “kid-safe” platforms become more embedded into the internet’s trust infrastructure.

One significant child-focused platform, Kiddle, delivers a striking pattern of geopolitical and ideological framing that softens authoritarian regimes and extremist movements while presenting itself as a trusted educational resource. Foreign terrorist organizations, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are whitewashed. Russia’s war on Ukraine is downgraded to a “military operation,” mirroring Kremlin language, while Joseph Stalin’s role in Russian history is reduced to his success in building a “strong, modern nation.”

Launched in 2014, Kiddle, which bills itself as a visual search engine for kids, appears prominently in Google searches, often ranking near the top of results. When asked for child-safe educational resources, ChatGPT recommended Kiddle alongside legacy institutions like Encyclopædia Britannica, World Book, National Geographic, and the Smithsonian.

While it boasts far less traffic than other search engines, Kiddle’s role in information infrastructure gives it outsize influence, as schools, libraries, and even PTAs link to the site. The International Society for Technology in Education (ITSE), an association with 100,000 education stakeholders, recommends Kiddle on its website, noting that “results are vetted by editors.” The top referrer of traffic to Kiddle in early 2026 was DiscoveryK12, an online homeschool curriculum.

Yet the content is less kid-friendly than expected. The platform’s article on Vladimir Putin, for example, offers a softened portrayal of the Russian president. Putin is presented as a peacemaker who is “known for ending the Second Chechen War.” When it comes to Putin’s successive wars of territorial conquest, Kiddle users learn only that under Putin, Russia “took control of Crimea” and “supported a war in eastern Ukraine.” While the need to present information to children in simple language can be appreciated, this characterization is jarringly at odds with nearly a decade of horrific warfare.

“Hamas facts for kids” informs young readers that “Hamas grew out of an Islamic charity” and supports “Palestinian nationalism,” meaning that it “believe[s] in the idea of a Palestinian nation.” Kiddle says that the U.S.-designated terrorist group’s “fight is with Zionists.” The word “terrorist” is mentioned just once, at the bottom of the article. Former Hamas leader and October 7 planner Yahya Sinwar is portrayed as a “very important leader” who “said he wanted to work for ‘peaceful, popular resistance’ against the Israeli presence.”

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, is “a special part of Iran’s military” whose goal is to “protect the Islamic Revolution.” Curious kids will also learn that the IRGC “work[s] to keep the country stable.” The late Ayatollah Khamenei, Kiddle claims, “supported Iran’s nuclear program for peaceful uses.” He was also a “strong supporter of the Persian language” with a penchant for poetry. No mention is made of the 2025-2026 protests during which state forces — acting at Khamenei’s direction — killed around 30,000 civilians.

Occasionally, a Russo- and Sino-centric view of key conflicts and figures shines through. “Hassan Nasrallah facts for kids” acknowledges that Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, but it notes that “some countries like Russia and China have different views.” Kiddle even clarifies that Russia considers Hezbollah a “legal social and political organization.”

“Uyghur people facts for kids” makes no mention of the genocide against China’s Muslim minority ethnic group, Chinese state-run concentration camps, or any of the abuses committed against these people. In a similar vein, the article on the Wuhan Institute of Virology leaves out the most important single fact about the center: it is considered the likely origin point of COVID-19.

Despite positioning itself as a trusted educational resource for children, Kiddle reveals almost nothing about who controls its platform or how its editorial decisions are made. The site publicly identifies no editors, no leadership team, no ownership entity, and no meaningful editorial standards governing politically sensitive material presented to children.

Ownership is obscured behind a U.S.-based privacy proxy. Kiddle does not disclose its founders, does not claim nonprofit status, and provides no public explanation of its governance structure despite operating as a heavily trafficked educational platform embedded across American schools and libraries.

The site’s Google-adjacent branding makes understanding the nature of the platform much more difficult. Its search bar features the Google logo with the term “Custom Search.” In 2016, EdTech Magazine reported that while Kiddle was not affiliated with the search giant, its results “are powered by Google, tailored to the needs of kids.” The site’s name seems like a reference to Google, and its primary-color-heavy logo is a distinct echo of the search giant. Schools, libraries, educational blogs, and even professional educational organizations have repeatedly described Kiddle as a Google product or as “developed by Google.”

Kiddle’s privacy policy states that the platform uses cookies “to personalize content and ads” and shares user information with advertising and analytics partners. That language raises a red flag concerning Google’s own advertising protections around child-directed services, which expressly forbid cookies that personalize ads. When I tested the site, Kiddle served children ads for cybersecurity threat reports, shopping extensions, mobile phone plans, steroid-related supplements, Robux acquisition guides, and other commercial content unrelated to education. Some ads solicited personal information directly through lead-generation forms — a clear violation of Google’s child-protection-related privacy policies. (Neither Kiddle nor Google responded to a request for comment for this article.)

A 2016 investigation by EdSurge suggested that Russian-born entrepreneur Vladislav Golunov—previously associated with the search engine Lukol—may be the site’s creator. But a decade later, we still don’t know who owns, operates, or oversees the site.

Kiddle has plans to expand into AI, with a new website, kiddle.ai, already live. Branded as “AI for kids,” the product is scheduled for release in July. DNS and hosting records show overlap between kiddle.ai and a subdomain, deepseek.kiddle.co, which references the Chinese AI company DeepSeek. While the exact relationship remains unclear, the appearance of Chinese AI branding alongside an opaque educational search platform with unknown ownership structures and problematic content raises further questions about who is building systems designed to engage kids at an important inflection point in the history of digital information.

None of this establishes definitively that Kiddle has a relationship with America’s enemies. But it does underscore how little transparency exists around a platform increasingly trusted to mediate information for children. A search engine recommended by schools, surfaced by Google, and cited by AI systems operates with no publicly known editors, no disclosed governance structure, and no meaningful public accountability.

That combination — institutional trust, opaque control, ideological framing, child targeting, AI amplification, and hidden governance — is what makes Kiddle more than just another strange corner of the internet. The platform has quietly embedded itself into the infrastructure through which children learn about war, politics, terrorism, and history. And almost nobody appears to know who is shaping that information, how those decisions are made, or whose interests it serves.

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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.

Ashley Rindsberg is a