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    News.com Rates Search Engines On Privacy

    How search engines rate on privacy has a report from News.com on how the various search engines rate on privacy. On August 6th, News.com sent eight questions to AOL, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, based on their responses, News.com rated Ask.com the best in terms of being the most protective of privacy. If you would […]

    How search engines rate on privacy has a report from News.com on how the various search engines rate on privacy.

    On August 6th, News.com sent eight questions to AOL, Ask.com, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, based on their responses, News.com rated Ask.com the best in terms of being the most protective of privacy.


    If you would like to see each search engine’s response, News.com posted them over here.

    News.com posted a nice little chart showing how each engine rated on privacy.

    Postscript From Danny: But Ask is the best? None of them really deserve to be rated yet, or you need a big giant qualification that they are promising stuff they’ve not yet to do. AskEraser doesn’t exist, but Ask gets to be best because of a program they haven’t implemented? None of them have yet to do their own programs, either. Until they do, I’m really wary of ranking them against each other.

    In the table, Ask, looks great except they won’t delete in minutes unless you are a user who expressly does this, and I think it would be fairer to go with the default time deletion that will happen for most typical searchers (18 months, I believe it will be).


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    About the Author

    Barry Schwartz

    Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

    In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

    Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.