Privacy and Alternatives

Charles Knight, over his popular AltSearchEngines blog, is keeping an interesting list of search engines that can be a complement to and/or substitute for de-facto standard, Google. Sometimes, he also organizes “A Day without Google” events and calls people to fast from Google at least for a day and give others a try. He is not alone of course; Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand is also known for his similar efforts. I applaud both of them; seems like some excitement and competition are lacking – similarly to the Windows, Mac, Linux case.

The reason why I mention this is that a new “search engine” has hit the homepages of all big, reader-powered, democratized sites like Digg and del.icio.us earlier this week – it’s called Googlonymous (sorry, no link for ethic reasons). The idea is to make your Google queries anonymous to protect you against the hypothetical “Big Eye”. The application is fully illegal of course, and that’s why I don’t link to it; neither the name, nor is the use of Google’s backend legal. So don’t expect it to have a long-run.

However, the fact that this site can make such a big splash in one night is a good indicator of people’s concerns. Recently, Ask.com and Live Search also have announced their plans to renew their privacy policies. If you are a reader of the hakia blog, you must know about our sensitivity as well. So, no worries, if you are so concerned about privacy, there are better and fully legal alternatives for you just open your eyes and look around.

        

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.