Ask.com is casting another stone against the Goliath(s) today with a new service called AskEraser that promises to make searches more private. Ask is currently the fifth most used search engine behind Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft, according to ComScore.
Ask.com is hoping protecting user privacy will be a springboard to gain on its competition. It might just work, considering search engines have come under fire over privacy issues. Questions about how anonymous users of search engines really are surfaced in 2006 when AOL released data for 650,000 users, which resulted in a lawsuit. Things have since boiled over into a full-fledge privacy brawl with privacy activists such as the Center for Democracy and Technology expressing deep concern over whether the data search engines collect about customer search habits is too much.
Major search engines have taken some steps to make searching more anonymous. The AskEraser is the latest attempt by a search engine.
A Good Start
After trying out AskEraser I liked it, but was not feeling like I had found privacy nirvana. The link to turn the AskErase service on and off is clearly visible on all Ask pages and was very simple to use.
Searches with AskEraser enabled and disabled appeared to be identical in results. Some services from Ask do require the AskEraser to be disabled, like homepage skins and the MyStuff feature, but the ease of turning AskEraser on and off did not create any significant conflicts.
Even though it isn't visually apparent that the searches are more secure and private, it is nice knowing that if I ever need to perform a secure search, that option is available. Hopefully this addition will also encourage other search engines to release similar services, but Google has already said that no such service is being developed.
That being said, be well aware that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others don't actively release your search logs, but know that somewhere, in a server facility somewhere, everything you search for is saved. A little scary, eh?
