Metasearch engine Ixquick promises to delete users’ privacy data within 48 hours.

Robert E.G. Beens, CEO of the metasearch engine Ixquick.com, has sent us a mail where he draws attention to the recent debate on search engine privacy concerns.

He points to the Financial Times. The newspaper says that “The race to accumulate the most comprehensive database of individual information has become the new battleground for search engines”.

Indeed, for good and for bad, search engines like Google are accumulating more and more data from our search habits, mail databases, bookmarking services, send-me-an-email-alert services, web feed readers and more.

The good news is that the search engines can use this information to generate more targeted and relevant search results. If you use the Google Toolbar, for instance, Google may give you unique, personalized, search results adapted to your interests. We guess that Yahoo! and Windows Live will try and do the same.

The fact that the search engines also can use this information to present you with more targeted text ads is in an for itself not a major problem. The search engines will, after all, have to generate revenue somewhere.

In order to do this, however, the search engines will have to store this data for some time. Even if you register under a fake name, clever people can , under the right circumstances, use the registered IP address to identify your searches.

The search engines can also make mistakes. Last year AOL released sensitive log data.

Hence it all boils down to whether you trust the search engines’ ability to protect your data.

Been’s point is that you by using Ixquick avoid such tracking, as he promises to delete IP addresses within 48 hours. In comparison Google will not make the data anonymous until after 18 to 24 months.

If you are nervous about your search profile, using Ixquick will give you better protection. Besides, Ixquick is one of the best metasearch engines out there.

That being said, one could also argue that Ixquick’s attack against the major search engines is unfair.

After all, Ixquick is a metasearch engine, i.e. a search engine that combines search results fetched from other search engines. The quality of Ixquick’s search results is ultimately dependent on the quality of results delivered by engines like Google, Ask and Windows Live. Ixquick benefits as much from the regular search engines’ ability to fight spam and fine tune search results as they do.

In the end it probably boils down to the following question: “Would it cause embarrassment to you or your family if someone gained access to your search history?”

If the answer is yes, you should consider ways of protecting yourself, for instance by using Ixquick or anonymizer services.

If the answer is “no”, we would not worry too much about using Google, Yahoo! or Windows Live.

See also: Norwegian authorities investigate Google on privacy issues