Daniel Brandt has been running his own search engine called Scroogle for just over three years. Scroogle.org is the anti-Google.
Scroogle carries no advertising and relies on small donations from users. Brandts search engine traffic has doubled every year and now attracts over 100,00 visitors a day. According to Brandt this growth has bee attributed to one factor: Privacy.
Scroogle keeps no record of who is using its site or what they are looking for. Within an hour of using the site, the search terms are gone for good.
All the big search groups have been tightening up their privacy policies. Last week the search engine Ask.com went further than others by offering a new service, Ask Eraser, that will wipe out a searcher’s queries within hours.
Google the industry leader stores personal information for 18 months, as does Microsoft’s search engine. Yahoo and Time Warner’s AOL retain search requests for 13 months.
Whilst few people would complain about internet searches being used to catch criminals, increasingly divorce lawyers subpoena search-engine firms looking for dirt on warring spouses. Highly personal information can be used in a variety of ways that were never sanctioned by the person who entered the search terms.
What happens over the next few months and years could well depend on investigations under way into Google’s privacy policies. In the US and Europe the search giant is under pressure from politicians over it’s purchase of online ad firm Double Click, the largest digital-ad server with a huge database of consumer searches.
