searchitup! is a revolutionary new search engine designed specifically for kids, parents and teachers. You might be thinking that kid-friendly search engines already exist, but if you step back for a moment and think about it, there is no search engine out there designed for kids (and by kids!) from the ground up. searchitup! has the power to positively change the way your children and students think, all while providing transparency, engagement, and increased functionality and control over Internet search results. We have even developed Pi, our voice search assistant who is child friendly and even prompts your kids and students to use "please" and reminds them to look for multiple sources of information to verify a fact.

Kids today are searching all the time! They use Google to help with school assignments both in and outside of the classroom, satisfy their curiosity and discover the world around them. However, Google search is simply not designed to meet the needs of children. It lacks the features to allow kids to objectively learn about the world in a safe and age appropriate way that is in collaboration with families and teachers. searchitup! gives parents and teachers peace of mind by allowing kids to search the Internet safely, with both specialized features and customized results to keep kids, engaged, learning and to allow for collaboration within the family at home and in the classroom at school. And of course we’re able to offer all of that in an ad free, private manner, with the capability of teaching kids about objectivity when discovering the world!

The development of searchitup! began in the weeks before Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic. As we began working from home, and schools shut down for our children we saw the need for searchitup! even more clearly. As our kids’ school days were completed at our dining room table we saw exactly how reliant they were on the mainstream search engines and we knew that there had to be a better way. And so, as the outside world slowed down for us, we moved at a feverish pace to create searchitup! We’re proud of what searchitup! is shaping up to be and how it strives to serve the needs of children, parents and teachers.

searchitup! was built by our very own family with our 3 elementary school aged kids because we saw gaps in existing technology.
Seeing first-hand how much our kids learn using Google search or by shouting at Alexa, Siri or Hey Google, was concerning to us.  Because of our background in search technology, it was evident to us, as parents, that so much of our kids’ world view was based on Google. We began to really question what our children were being exposed to since so much of Google is based on SEO and content that is designed for commercial success…not necessarily our children’s success. When Covid-19 hit, it magnified the issues we already saw, and it motivated us to take action.
We set out to solve some of the biggest problems we noticed. We didn’t like that our kids were in a “vacuum” when they were searching the Internet. It wasn’t about keeping tabs on them when they were in front of a screen, but rather understand the motivations behind what they were doing on the Internet. We began to have discussions about privacy, objectivity, biases, and online safety as a family, and after our kids promoted themselves to becoming our first (non salaried!) Directors of Fun, we started building.

We noticed early on that our kids would ask us to search for things – they would say “Mom, what ingredients do we need to make slime? – can you please search-it-up?” or “Dad, what’s the best Pokemon card? Can you please search-it-up?” The phrase caught on in our house in a big way.