I’ve been looking around for a new search engine besides Google.  I’m worried about giving them all the business and their privacy policy scares me.  They’re collecting more and more of our information and no one seems to notice.  (Take a look at Google’s new Dashboard if you want to see what they’re collecting on you)  I’ll admit, I haven’t started running my own MTA again but I’m getting close. Do you want my public key?  I hope you have one.  There’s guys in Utah and St. Louis looking through your email contents as I write this….

Anyways…back on track….

It’s not the easiest task comparing privacy policies even if you limit your search to the big players (google, yahoo, bing, baidu, ask, altavista).  Besides Scroogle which is a Google proxy — returning scrubbed results cookie free, most of the large search engines are very similar with their policies.  They all store some type of tracking cookie and say they can use this to target specific advertisements towards you and or share with third parties.  HOWEVER, all is not lost, I did come across the Ask.com AskEraser.  Navigate over to Ask.com and in the top right corner you’ll see “AskEraser On | Off”  turn this guy and check your cookies for yourself….it does make a difference…

When enabled, AskEraser will completely delete your search queries and data from Ask.com servers, including: your IP address, User ID and Session ID cookies, as well as the complete text of your search query–all within a matter of hours,

We’ll have to take Ask’s word that they’re actually removing our search data from their servers unless someone has a better idea?  Raid one of their NOCs on a Friday night hoping to bribe the night security guard with a pizza and a hooker? (maybe the pizza and a mountain dew would be enough)