Startpage and its EU brand Ixquick has long been among the search engine industry’s leaders when it comes to protecting your privacy. These services do not record the IP addresses of legitimate users and abolished the use of Unique ID cookies already in 2006. They now take privacy one step further and offer anonymous browsing of your search results through a proxy service.

Update: Ixquick.com provides similar functionality and privacy as Startpage and is localized in several languages: Danish, Dutch, English, English UK, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

How it works

When you do a search, click “proxy” visible option below each search result. Startpage now acts as an intermediary and retrieve the page and display it in a privacy-protected Startpage window.

This way you have complete anonymity, since you never make direct contact with the third-party website. Your IP address is invisible to the websites you view. Neither can these website see or place cookies on the user’s browser.

Unfortunately, the proxy option doesn’t always let you view web pages as they are intended. When I tested it (on Firefox, Safari and Chrome for Mac) most web pages were shown without css, which in some cases just fuddles the web design, in other cases makes the web page illegible.

Here is a video explaining the new service:

Search and privacy

Ask.com offers a privacy tool called AskEraser, which deletes all future search queries and associated cookie information from Ask.com servers, including IP address, User ID, Session ID, and the complete text of their queries. You will find the AskEraser link in the upper right corner of the Ask.com homepage and search results pages.

Another search engine, Yauba, offers a similar service — with out the stylesheet problems. Yauba is an Indian start-up semantic search engine with their own index. It has an uncluttered user interface which is easy to use yet holds a number of advanced search options. In April 2009 I interviewed Yauba founder A. Ahmed Hossain about privacy and other aspects of this new combatant on the search engine arena.´

Most other search engines and all of the “big three” of search — Google, Yahoo and Bing — store several kinds of private data related to searches.

You might also be interested in this post:
The future of search may be personalized, but what about your privacy?