On October 18, 2022, I wrote two articles about free products offered by Norton, which is best known for its antivirus products and recently for dabbling in turning customers into crypto miners before shuttering that undeniably innovative program. I reviewed Norton Safe Search, a Norton-powered search tool. While I had no interest in adding Norton Safe Search to my own list of search tools, my curiosity was sparked when I noticed that it drew results from ask.com search, which is unusual (the majority of search front-ends use Bing’s index with a minority relying on Google’s). Of course, Norton Safe Search’s selling point is not where its results come from (ultimately Google since ask.com uses Google’s index), but instead the Safe functionality. Results come with Norton Safeweb ratings, so while I was in the area, I wrote a side post on how to write a browser custom search shortcut for Norton Safeweb.
My Norton Safe Search review became unexpectedly popular, gaining views throughout 2023 and celebrating its 13-month anniversary with a dominant showing in taking the top-ranking in our November 2023 ranking. The review was not done being popular – it sits in second place in our overall 2024 ranking, trailing only a cycling article which received a huge Hacker News bump. If that were not enough, it took the first-place view ranking in June, September, October, and November in 2024 and, barring some unexpected event, will easily claim the title of “most visited article of 2024 which did not make Hacker News page one.”
I have never figured out why the Norton review is popular (admittedly “popular” by our growing-but-modest standards). I doubt that most Norton customers have ever used Safe Search on purpose, and the only reason I know it exists is because it showed up in my referrer logs once. I suspect that people search for other Norton things on Google and my Norton Safe Search article appears on occasion. Its autumnal success could be tied to some Norton Black Friday sales, but its second best month in terms of total page views in 2024 (behind November) was February – so who knows?
But I digress.
In my review of Norton Safe Search, I identified two flaws with the Norton Safe Web ratings that appeared next to results. Firstly, the safe web ratings did not appear next to ad results. I opined, and maintain, that this shortcoming somewhat defeats the purpose of Norton Safe Search since many searchers may not immediately distinguish between ad and organic results. Secondly, and more personally, our humble online writing magazine came with a question mark. That is right – we did not have a “Safe Web” rating.
I felt a little bit sad. Not sad enough to figure out if it was possible to obtain Norton approval, but sad in the sense that this thing is out there and I did not have it.
It has been two years since I checked to see whether we had a Norton Safeweb checkmark (I tried to run a domain-specific Norton search a few months ago, but discovered that it did not have this functionality). I decided to check again.
Look at that! We have a green check mark now.
Norton Safeweb has indeed confirmed that The New Leaf Journal is SAFE. I did not have to do a single thing.
You can see the live link and an archived capture from December 19, 2024.
What does this mean for us? Not much – our humble website does not run third-party scripts (save for a Gravatar Webmention/comment sneaking through on occasion) or ask for any information from you. I dare say we were less dangerous than most of the green checkmarks from the start. But all jokes aside, my understanding is that the Norton suite is popular, especially in Windows land (whether it should be is beyond our scope). I like collecting things like green checkmarks for the site (the X checkmark is too expensive). I suppose the Norton fans among the reader-base can now feel extra reassured when visiting that we have the Norton seal of not being an evil dangerous website that will infect your computer and steal all of your personal information.
