Norton is a well-known commercial antivirus company. It also dabbles in other projects such as cryptomining. Back in 2022, I reviewed Norton Safe Search, a niche Norton service which seeks in integrate its Norton Safeweb reputation service with a search engine. I did not review Norton in the sense that I used it for an extended period, but instead sought to determine how it worked and where its search results came from. I started the project after noticing Norton Safe Search in my Koko Analytics logs.
I had little reason to believe that my Norton Safe Search article would be popular, but it ended up unexpectedly being our seventh most-visited article of 2023 and the second most-visited article of 2024. As of July 11, 2025, it was the ninth most-visited article all time on The New Leaf Journal. Despite my review’s surprising success, I never followed up on it. I did once try to incorporate Norton Safe Search into an article wherein I tried running a domain-specific search of New Leaf Journal in various search engines and front-ends, but I found to my great disappointment that Norton Safe Search did not support domain-specific searches.
Our Norton Safe Search story drought ends today.
Since September 5, 2025, I have been using a WordPress plugin called Statify to keep track of page hits. Every time a page is loaded, Statify records a hit, grouping together the target page, referrer (if applicable), and time stamp. Like my previous local analytics plugin Koko Analytics, Statify runs entirely locally with no third-party dependencies. (I am using Statify through the end of 2025 but am undecided regarding 2026.)
I present to you a visit picked up on Statify on November 17, 2025:
The third column is the referrer column. As you can see, the referrer header includes the search query, which was almost certainly typed into the search bar as:
norton safe search vs duckduckgo
The vast majority of search engine referrals do not include the query. For example, my top four referrers on November 17 were, in order, https://google.com, https://duckduckgo.com, https://search.brave.com, and https://bing.com. Statify did not pick up the specific query for any of those, but it did for search.nortonbrowser.com. I will note that this is not the first time I have seen this behavior. Both Yahoo and AOL (not common referrers for NLJ) sometimes include search queries.
I decided to try visiting https://search.nortonbrowser.com. Instead of being taken to North Safe Search, I was redirected to Norton’s U.S. home page. Norton Safe Search is still available at https://search.norton.com, which was its URL when I reviewed it more than three years ago. What is Norton Browser? According to Norton, it is a free (as in cost) “private browser” with built in ad-blocking. While the browser makes a point of noting that one can use any search engine, Norton suggests using Norton Safe Search to allow the browser to warn the user about potentially dangerous websites. The browser does not come with Norton’s antivirus (not surprising since the antivirus is very much not free of cost). To my surprise, it also does not come with Norton Safeweb! Norton notes that Norton Safeweb can be installed as an extension, but put me down as confused as to why Norton does not include its own extension with its browser for people who may want to use Norton’s browser with a non-Norton search engine.
According to a contemporaneous press release, Norton Browser was released in September 2023, which would explain why it did not come up in my Norton Safe Search research in 2022. Neither of the two links I provided thus far note Norton Browser’s underlying technology. I was reasonably confident (read almost certain) that Norton Browser would be based on Chromium, and screenshots from a 2025 ZDNET review oddly titled I tried Norton Private Browser to see how it compares to Tor – here’s what I found that notes what is obvious from the screenshots: “Norton Private Browser is based on Chromium…” Regarding this review’s headline, Norton and Tor have nothing in common other than the fact that they are both web browsers. This headline is absurd. Worse yet, the article actually undertakes a comparison between Norton Browser and Tor Browser (insofar as I infer from some of the section headers). Trying to parse a Norton Browser-Tor comparison would be an article unto itself, but I submit for the record that the target audiences for Norton Browser and Tor are not quite the same (as a threshold matter, I doubt that many people download Tor Browser by accident). While I would recommend that Norton fans who demand a Chromium-based browser use Brave or even a proprietary option such as Vivaldi, Chrome, or Edge with their favorite Norton extensions and features added on, I suppose there are many worse options than Norton Browser so long as Norton is making timely updates.
But I digress. What why did I receive a search referral from Norton Browser? I cannot say for certain since I cannot test Norton Browser (no Linux version, not that I would test it even if there were a Linux version), but I have a theory. I will guess that Norton Safe Search is the default search engine for Norton Browser. Someone, perhaps trying Norton Browser for the first time (perhaps a Windows user installed it by accident, that was how I learned about Avast’s web browser back in my Windows days) was confused about Norton Safe Search. This Norton Browser user may be privacy conscious (set aside whether Norton Browser would be a good choice for the privacy conscious) or otherwise have some reason for not liking Google Search. This individual, in a search for information, looked for a comparison between Norton Safe Search and DuckDuckGo. While it may be too late, I think I am qualified to briefly compare them (it will not be my first DuckDuckGo review).
I have explained in prior articles that DuckDuckGo is not a search engine per se. Its regular search results come from Bing’s search index, although they may differ from the results one would find with Bing proper due to the lack of personalization (as evidence, I submit that we disappeared from DuckDuckGo when Bing de-indexed us for several months in 2023). DuckDuckGo offers its own suite of features from instant answers to maps to (unfortunately) its own AI implementation to distinguish itself from Google and Bing, but potential DuckDuckGo searchers should understand that there is no “DuckDuckGo index” in a meaningful sense. This is not to say DuckDuckGo is not recommendable; I use it often as a general-use search engine.
When I reviewed Norton back in 2022, I determined that it was a front-end for Ask.com searches, which in turn was a front-end for Google. Is that still the case in 2025? I ran a test search for The New Leaf Journal and you can see the result below:
(Aside: Note as I covered in December 2024 that we are now Norton Safeweb verified. This was not the case in 2022.)
The URL for the search results page begins with “nortonsafe.search.ask.com” so I will assume my 2022 review is still evergreen. The order of results closely tracks Google, so setting “ask.com” middleman aside, Norton Safe Search appears to still essentially be a Norton-fied Google Search with extra Norton and less in the way of search functionality.
Were one to tell me that he or she would only use DuckDuckGo or Norton Safe Search, I would have to recommend DuckDuckGo. I say have to recommend because from functionality to privacy I doubt that I could come up with any basis for recommending Norton over DuckDuckGo other than a preference for Google’s index over Bing’s (in which case there are more robust options than Norton Safe Search). However, on the off-chance that this person wanted Norton Safeweb protection, I would note that Norton Safeweb is available as a web extension and that I have a handy guide for creating a custom search shortcut for Norton Safeweb (it would even work in Norton Browser).
I conclude by noting that my opinions about Norton Browser and Norton Safe Search have nothing to do with Norton’s core antivirus products. I do not have experience with the commercial antivirus options for Windows and MacOS, so I would leave comparing them for others (while noting that I would just use Microsoft Defender, which comes with Windows, were I forced to use Windows instead of Linux).
