This article is written for Google Workspace for Education Administrators.
Problem
Do you know kids in your school can play games simply by doing a Google search Snake or Pacman? As you can see in the screenshot, Google posted 8 games in the category of Games and Toys, Snake, Animal sounds, Tic tac toe, Solitaire, Minesweeper, Spin a dreidel, Earth Day quiz and PAC-MAN. In addition, there are countless more games the students can access by searching up “Google Doodle Games”
Google Doodle Games are online website games that google develop themselves. They can be easily accessed by the keywords “Doodle”, “Google Doodle”, or “Google Doodle Games”, along with any additional words to search for a specific game.
Your first reaction to the problem is to blacklist the game URL, like https://www.google.com/search?q=snake. Unfortunately, it's ineffective. It only covers one keyword, snake. Many keywords can trigger the game, play snake, play snake game, the snake game, or even s n a k e, see the spaces. On the other hand, a wildcard URL blocking may overkill innocent Google searches, for example, *q=snake* kills science class keywords snake kinds.
Solution
Safe Doc chrome extension blocks all Google games at out of the box, without any configuration. If you have yet to install Safe Doc for your school, please get a 30-days trial.
Here is a demonstration of Safe Doc blocking google games. Safe Doc detects the game elements in the page and automatically removes them from the search results.
To block the Google games widget, please add and set the policy BlockGoogleSearchGames to true. See Safe Doc Configuration for more instructions of Safe Doc customization.
"BlockGoogleSearchGames": {
"Value": true
}
Conclusion
In this blog post, we have discussed how to to block Google search games. By implementing these methods, you can ensure a more productive online experience and maximize your time for more important tasks.
You may also like other features of Safe Doc
Safe Doc
