cenSEI T H E
Report
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A new breed of search engines: Non-invasive alternatives to Google
came from Ixquick and not from you. A company press release also announced that, beginning October 2011, all searches would be encrypted by default. Ixquick’s zero data collection rule is reflected in their privacy policy. The privately owned Dutch company that runs Ixquick, Surfboard Holding BV, also operates Startpage, a search engine that utilizes Google search results and uses the same privacy protection as Ixquick. Gibiru. Gibiru is based on Google’s search algorithm modified to limit information collected about your browsing behavior, “thus removing behavioral search result filtering and censoring so that you get natural untargeted search results,” it proclaims on its website. As with the aforementioned search engines, Gibiru also does not use your cookie data and IP address. Based on information available on their official website, Gibiru seems to be a reaction to what they regard as the collusion between the U.S. government, major publishers, and search engines to “chill Internet discourse” by tracking user behavior and imposing Internet censorship, citing an alleged crackdown by the National Security Agency on online “alternative news” sources, such as Wikileaks, that publish content on U.S. government
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operations in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, political scandals, and even unidentified flying objects and astrophysics. Davids to Google’s Goliath? Compared to Google’s reach – half the world’s Internet population visited the page in the past three months, according to Alexa – these less popular search engines corner a very tiny fraction of the market. Overtaking the top three search engines in terms of popularity is highly unlikely in the near future, but, as privacy concerns and dissatisfaction with personalized search grow, there is a big opportunity for growth available to these small players. In the Technology Review report, DuckDuckGo’s Gabriel Weinberg says he believes new search engines can fragment the market even just a little bit, and recalls how Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer, lost its dominance. “It’s the same as happened with Web browsers. People realized that there was very little choice, and then it fragmented again,” says Weinberg. Whether any of these alternative search engines will knock Google, Yahoo!, or Bing off the top spots remains to be seen, but for now, it’s at least good to know that there are other options that offer quality search results without scrimping on privacy protection.
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