Ixquick: A Search engine that protects your privacy

Today we can be as open and as sharing as we want to be. We can publish and share minute by minute account in our status pages (Facebook, Google+, Twitter,…) of what we are doing, where we are, who we are with, who said what, our love stories, our heartaches, our heartbreaks…

Well, you get the picture.

The above reference is an individual’s choice about how much information they want to share, but what about instances when people share a lot without even being aware of how much they shared!

For instance, when we search on search engines…we are being tracked, whether we like it or not, our activities are tracked. It is quite an eye opener actually, the amount of information search engines have about our search behaviour, our likes and dislikes, the sites we visit, what we bought, and so much more.

Search engines track our search behaviour for various reasons, a few examples could be, utilizing the data for internal use in order to improve search experience, to customize the search results for you, to provide data to advertisers and third party agencies…

These are sensitive data and they should ideally belong to you only!

Many of the search engines allow you to set your privacy settings, however, in spite of opting in for privacy in the settings options, a lot of your search data is still available to
search engines.

However, this situation is not so dismal, you can always install a software that would ensure privacy while surfing the web.

The good news is you don’t need to purchase a software to ensure privacy anymore, today you have free options of browsing the web without being watched. It is indeed refreshing to find alternate search engines that are not recording your search history and selling it to third party agencies. One such search engine is DuckDuckgo. I recently published an article on DuckDuckGo search engine. DuckDuckgo is such a refreshing change. It has quickly captured my heart, and now I am a big fan of DuckDuckgo. Not only does it have a clean interface, it lets you search anonymously!

There are a few more search engines that are advocating and implementing “no tracking” policy in their search results. Ixquick is one such alternate search engine. Ixquick displays results from ten major search engines, the results pages in not clutter free, you will find Ads, but  the important thing is, Ixquick protects your privacy, and when they say anonymous searching, they mean it.

Typically, in a search results page when you click on a link you are taken directly to that particular site and pretty much that happens when you click on the search results link on Ixquick as well, once you are out of Ixquick, your data may not be private any more. However, Ixquick found a solution to this, you will find a “Proxy” link below each search result, as shown in the screenshot below:

If you click on the proxy link instead of the direct link, the results page will open through the proxy server, that way, the site gets loaded in Ixquick and you are ensured of your privacy:

For more information on Ixquick’s privacy policy, here is a link to Ixquick’s privacy policy, its tag line says it all, The World’s most private search engine.

With your privacy protected, enjoy browsing without any more worries about being tracked with every single click!

What are your thoughts on privacy and surfing the web anonymously?
I look forward to your responses.