Link of the Day: Startingpage

Startingpage bills itself as “the world’s most private search engine.” BoingBoing recently described it as “a sort of middle-man between you and Google that keeps no records or data on their own at all.”

Why is that useful? “Google and other search engines,” BoingBoing blogger Sean Bonner explains, “track what users search; over time, the data collected can be pretty revealing, so much so that the [US Department of Justice] wants access… But what if no data were collected to begin with?”

That’s the way Startingpage operates. “So even if they were subpoenaed by, say, the DoJ, they’d have none of your search data to hand over. And all Google knows is someone made a search from Starting Page, but there’s no way for them to know whose searches are whose.”

Posted in Link of the Day