Privacy concerns are becoming a major social and legal issue these days. Search engines play an important role in the whole equation. The AOL Privacy Breach last year is just one example of what can happen if search engine user-data are being stored.
Meta-search engine Ixquick.com's simple solution: "If the data is not stored, users privacy can't be breachedâ€. We are the first search engine to stop recording any privacy details of our users.
Some background information: -Ixquick is a meta search engine, developed in 1998 in NY, since 2001 part of Surfboard Holding BV. -It offers a simultaneous search in up to 12 of the best search engines. -Ixquick will not share IP addresses with these individual search engines while searching. -Ixquick will delete the IP addresses of the users within 48 hrs.
In fact we have a program running which opens the log files, deletes the user related IP addresses and overwrites the "old" logfile. Also we took away the unique ID out of our Cookies, the Cookie is only used for remembering the settings on the user's PC. We even overwrite the "old" Cookie if a user has one on his PC from before this privacy initiative.