Yauba is a new search engine that ensures your privacy throughout the entire search experience.

Privacy and search is a hot topic. After considerable pressure from the EU commission, Google reduced the period it stores personal information in its logs from 18 to 9 months last September.

Metasearch engine Ixquick used to store IP addresses for a mere 48 hours. Now they don’t store IP addresses at all.

Yauba is an brand new yet fully fledged semantic search engine with their own index and a claim to offer truly anonymous search with three levels of privacy. It has an uncluttered user interface which is easy to use yet holds a number of advanced search options.

We have asked Yauba founder A. Ahmed Hossain about search privacy and about other aspects of this new combatant on the search engine arena.

Pandia: How does Yauba ensure search privacy?

Hossain: We are the only search engine that offers 3 levels of privacy protection for our users:

• We use no cookies
• We do not store any of our users’ search (or any other personally identifiable) information
• We provide our users the ability to visit third party sites with the same level of privacy protection

Pandia: Most major search engines use personal info to fine tune results. Won’t your search engine suffer from the lack of this?

Hossain: We believe that this supposed trade-off between privacy and user experience is one of the greatest fallacies concerning online privacy. We do not think that is a question of either/or, but rather both.

Our auto-refinement, auto-navigation, auto-categorisation and distributed semantic technologies allow users to find the exact the information they need, without recording or storing any personal details.

Pandia: Do you plan to brand Yauba as an alternative to the Big Three or to licence the technology to others?

Hossain: Our primary goal is to offer Internet users a viable, world class alternative to the major search engines. Currently, there is no real alternative for Internet users who want to search the Web but do not want cookies placed on their computer, or who want to visit third party web results in privacy as well.

We plan to brand Yauba as both a standalone Internet search engine as well as a software and technology firm for solution providers. We also license various components of our search, navigation, categorisation and refinement technologies.

Pandia: What are the characteristics of your semantic approach and what makes it different from other semantic search engines?

Hossain: We use our semantic technologies primarily to allow personalisation of search results without privacy invasive personalisation technologies such as cookies.

In essence, our approach to semantic search is very similar to the way a real librarian would help a user with a query.

For example, if a student were to ask a real librarian about information on “Java”, the librarian wouldn’t suddenly give the student tons of information about Java the programming language. Instead the librarian would use innate intelligence and semantic understanding of the different concepts of “Java” to clarify together with the student which sense of the term the student was referring to — the programming language, the coffee or the island. This way, the librarian would be able to offer personalised service to the student even without knowing anything about the student.