Web News

Startpage Introduces Anonymous Web Search

While big names like Google and Yahoo regularly harvest user information from Web searches, alternative search engine Startpage—known as Ixquick outside Britain and the Americas—allows people to conduct searches in complete anonymity.

The Dutch-owned company has been focusing on search privacy and user safety since its launch in 2005. Its previous programs offered protected search only on the site itself, which means users were again vulnerable once they leave the site.

The new program lets users conduct the search on a proxy page, which may slow down loading (since the results have to be retrieved and reloaded) but assures that no personal information is collected, even when users click on search results.

Katherine Albrecht, the company’s U.S. marketing officer, said that the idea for anonymous search came when she noticed that search engine giant Google was gathering information on users looking up the flu and sharing it with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt sparked controversy in a TV interview last month, when he justified the company’s data-gathering practices by saying any practices that users want to hide from authorities probably should not be practiced in the first place.

Schmidt added that Google and other search engines do gather user information and retain them for some time, and may make them available to authorities as needed—and that this practice is the norm under the U.S. Patriot Act.

However, among major search engines, Google was the only one in 2006 to refuse to hand over user data following a subpoena from the U.S. Justice Department, saying it went against their user privacy policy and would put their trade secrets at risk. Startpage, not having information on file, could not be asked to surrender any data.

Startpage gets much of its revenue from advertising and sponsored links, which includes is matched to the search terms but not to user information. Although no numbers have been published, the company says it has served more than 1.2 billion searches by the end of 2009.