Ixquick It

Just a decade or so ago, metasearch engines compiled search results from dozens of viable web search engines. Today, there are really only a handful of commonly used search engines. The dominant engines practice data-mining to turn a profit.

That's not cool.

Yahoo is struggling. Bing is a joke... sorry Microsoft. Google, although it offers so many other free services, has become a scary behemoth. Google probably knows more about me than I do. I try to use it as little as possible. We need another option.

Enter Ixquick. Ixquick doesn't log data about its users, so there's nothing to sell. It also provides a proxy to visit the sites you've searched in private.

It's a fast way to search, too. One of the things I once liked about searching with Google was the ability to type a word and search by hitting enter. The new autocomplete messes up my timing with searches. Sometimes it puts letters in front of the ones I've already typed. Boo! That takes time to correct. Ixquick is a type-and-enter search, making it faster than Google, now.

Ixquick is becoming what the other search engines wanted to be when they first started. Google and Yahoo have been killed by the perception that changing things creates progress. What inspired people to use Google was the no-frills search with decent results. That's becoming a thing of the past.

I've been Ixquick searching for a few years, now. The engine has become faster and results are getting better. I foresee the day when it eclipses some of the other engines.

Will I still use Google for email, blogging and reading newsfeeds? For now, yes. But if a company like Ixquick pops up offering the save services at a nominal cost, I might have to make that leap.

If you still feel like you just MUST get the results you'd get from Google, Ixquick has a sister site called Startpage.com which returns Google search results through a privacy proxy.

Search Ixquick at www.ixquick.com or StartPage at www.startpage.com.