A Dutch company says it has developed the world’s first Internet search engine that guarantees users absolute privacy.
Ixquick, established in 1998, is a meta-search engine that uses the search results of several search engines to provide its own list of results. The search is available in 17 languages.
“Ixquick is the first search engine that does not even store IP [Internet protocol] addresses temporarily,” Ixquick chief executive officer Robert Beens said.
Most search engines store users’ IP addresses on its servers — and leave so-called “cookies” on each of the users’ computers that track his or her search behavior.
With Ixquick, all IP addresses and anonymized files, which are used by search engines like Google and Yahoo to optimize its search results, are erased from its servers.
One of its latest features is technology that can instantly differentiate a human using its search engine from a search robot, Beens said.
Search robots often perform automated searches on search engines to acquire addresses and privacy details.
A robot can perform tens of thousands of searches per minute, resulting in a substantial slowdown of the server.
In order to avoid search robot abuse, Ixquick used to store IP addresses for 48 hours, the time needed to trace and block the search robot’s IP addresses.
“But our new technology can recognize and block a search robot instantly,” Beens said.
As a result, Ixquick does not know how many “unique users” it has. It can only tell how many searches were performed from a certain area, such as 30,000 per day in the Netherlands.
It also has no information about the surfing habits of its users.
However, the Dutch search engine can only guarantee personal privacy concerning Internet traffic between someone’s private computer and the IxQuick server.
As soon you as you click on any of the search results provided by the Ixquick Web site, your privacy is lost.
“All Internet service providers [ISPs] that you pass while establishing the connection between your home computer and that particular Web site you found through the Ixquick search engine will register you passed through them,” Beens said. “European Union law obligates ISPs to store this information for up to six months.”
Ixquick is therefore developing a so-called proxy server, he said. This idea — already applied by other companies — involves setting up a separate server that will tell all ISPs you are surfing from Ixquick rather than from your home IP address.
“When you click on a search result provided by Ixquick, all ISPs that you pass in order to get to that particular Web site will think you originated from the Ixquick Web site,” Beens said.
Beens said his company is particularly popular in Germany, where “people are more privacy-conscious than in the Netherlands.”
After Ixquick received the first EuroPrivacy Award last July, he said, the number of searches performed in Germany increased by 30 percent. In the US it went up by 20 percent.
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