MESSAGE
| DATE | 2014-02-22 |
| FROM | Ruben
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] farm animals and extermination camps
|
Why Traffic To These Google Alternatives Is Soaring
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2014/02/10/why-traffic-to-these-google-alternatives-is-soaring/
What you look for on the Internet reveals a lot about you, which is why
a growing number of people are turning to services that do not track
their searches and offer greater privacy protections than Google.
?The consciousness is only slowly building on the dangers,? says Robert
Beens , CEO of
Dutch companies Startpage and
Ixquick *,***which provide anonymous searches. ?It
is very easy to see how this treasure trove of data can be misused in
the future.?
?For instance, you make searches for your medical condition?That is
extremely interesting information for medical companies, for insurances
companies.?
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?It could increase your premium if you search for a couple of specific
keywords. It is not being done today, to my knowledge, but it is very
easy to see it leading to that in the future.?
Ixquick, which started the same year as Google in 1998, and its sister
site Startpage had fewer than a million visitors a day in January 2012
when Google changed its privacy policy
to combine user information from its various services. Within two months
the alternative sites saw traffic double. By spring 2013, the number of
visitors was up to about 2.5 million a day. Then Edward Snowden?s
revelations about government snooping led to a new wave of interest in
the sites. Traffic today is more than five million users a day
.
quick/Startpage)
Daily user traffic at Google alternative search sites Ixquick/Startpage
(Graphic courtesy of Ixquick)
Another privacy friendly search site, DuckDuckGo
, saw similar spikes in traffic at
those junctions and now has nearly 4.5 million visits a day
.
To be sure, Google crushes the competition in search. For the U.S.
market in December, Google has 67.3 percent of the market with 12.3
billion searches a month, followed by Microsoft sites (18.2 percent),
Yahoo (10.8 percent) and Ask (2.5 percent), according to comScore
.
The reason for Google?s dominance is clear: many users find the site
more fulfilling than alternatives.
How do these privacy friendly sites work? Startpage uses Google results
which it buys from the company (in a slightly less user friendly
interface); its sister company Ixquick, as well as rival site
DuckDuckGo*,* present results compiled from a series of different search
engines. For example, DuckDuckGo says its sources are its own web
crawler, Yahoo!, Yandex, WolframAlpha, Bing and crowd-sourced sites such
as Wikipedia.
Another privacy option comes from Boston-based Abine
, which offers a free Firefox browser plugin
*GoogleSharing*
**that
scrambles the records of Google searches among different users. With the
browser, you use the same Google.com page, but it may not always work as
smoothly as going directly to Google. About 50,000 people use the plugin
daily.
?It looks like you are coming out of a big corporate network,? says
Abine CEO Rob Shavell says about Google?s ability to track users of the
plugin. ?There are still some bugs so are we rebuilding the
platform?It?s a little bit of a cat and mouse game.?
Are these search engine privacy companies making a big fuss over
nothing? I contacted Google for their response. ?Some privacy advocates
say in the future Google could sell searches to insurance companies and
others,? I wrote. ?Has that ever happened and could that happen in the
future? What can the company say to calm any possible user concerns on
this issue??
The official corporate response avoided any direct response to that or
other questions I posed. The spokesman also asked that his name not be
printed, despite a specific request that a named official speak for Google.
?Google goes above and beyond to make sure your information is safe,
secure and always available to you,? the spokesman said. ?Our commitment
to the security of your data is absolute ? we have more than 400
full-time security experts providing design reviews, consulting,
training and education across the company, as well as building privacy
and security technologies into our products.?
I wrote again seeking more precise answers and perhaps the opportunity
to talk with one of those 400 security experts. They did not write back.
Google makes billions of dollars through its beloved search engine by
running ads alongside the results. The negative exploitation of an
individual?s search data forecast by Robert Beens of Startpage has yet
to happen, as far as anyone knows. But it does seem that Google could do
more to allay fears that someday search histories could come back to haunt.
For millions of users, that uncertainty means they turn to the privacy
friendly alternatives, especially when looking up topics such as medical
ailments or sensitive personal issues.
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