Recommended: ixquick search engine

Big commercial search engines are not free. They collect as much personal information about you as possible every time you log on, they collect your searches, they analyze them, and they find ways to make money from that information.

The worst is Google. Privacy International (PDF) provided privacy rankings for major search engines and other widely used sites like MySpace and YouTube. At the bottom was Google that PI ranked as absolutely hostile toward its customers' privacy.

Ixquick is different. The core of their privacy policy is a commitment to delete information about your searches within 48 hours. Their policy has been reviewed favorably by a long list of computer experts, including those published in CNET, ZDNet, the London Guardian and the New York Times.

Here's what the Guardian had to say :

The bad news is that Google - which supplies AOL's search results - has all that information and more. If you use Google's Gmail, address book, calendar, maps and other services, it could even tie your search data to things you are really doing. By the way, Google also knows which other websites you visit, if they use AdWords, and when.

Google's argument for collecting and storing all this invasive data is that it can provide better search results and, particularly, better targeted advertisements. The ads are how Google makes its billions. But trading privacy risks for better advertising sounds like a bad deal for users.

One answer is to delete the cookies that Google and other search engines (which are mostly as bad, or worse) put on your hard drive, and do searches via an anonymous proxy, so the search engine cannot tie them to your internet address. Another is to switch to search engines that say they don't record user data. Examples include ixquick (www.ixquick.com/) and Clusty (http://clusty.com).

I've been using ixquick.com and found that not only does it have a better privacy policy, but its power search options and interface are more advanced and user friendly than Google. We recommend that you give it a try. Link

Ixquick Metasearch