62% of Searchers Don’t Trust Their Engines: They Want Control & Seem to Be Getting It!
Our “Search for Better Search Conversation†results were pretty upsetting and reported bad news to us all in the search industry. 62% of searchers don’t trust their search engines and have asked the search engines to improve their privacy practices. The good news is we are all listening and the Web searcher is reigning more control every day:
- hakia.com does not place cookies on the user’s computer without explicit permission. You could search cookie free at hakia search engine on the very first day we became online, you can do so today. We had made that policy decision a while ago.
- Google recently announced its cookies will expire in two years and it will anonymize search log data after 24 months.
- Ask.com announced yesterday that it will launch “Ask Eraser†in the near future, a feature to allow the user to erase his/her search history. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has a long post about Ask.com’s plans and the implementation challenges ahead.
Well, Web searchers, kudos to you! We are tuning in to the sound of your privacy requests.
July 20th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
well
“Ask.com announced yesterday that it will launch “Ask Eraser†in the near future, a feature to allow the user to erase his/her search history”
may be they are following Haki really after you are using their sponsored listing.
July 21st, 2007 at 3:14 pm
“- hakia.com does not place cookies on the user’s computer without explicit permission.”
Don’t you think it’s annoing to ask a permission every time? Or on the other hand how do you want to find out what do your users need?
July 22nd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Dear Egorych,
Thanks for the excellent questions! Let me try to answer them.
We have some exciting products in the pipeline. When hakia users want to try those products, we will tell them explicity that this X,Y,Z service requires cookies to be placed into your computer. Do you agree? That’s what we mean with explicit permission.
We do not track users’ clicking history to enrich our understanding of the use of language or what you mean when you ask a question or a query. We have our ontological resources and our in-house technology to understand meaning expressed by language. You can check it out at labs.hakia.com
Have a great weekend!