[Imagine a blockquote]

If you're like most people, you share your deepest thoughts and innermost secrets several times a day with the total strangers who run your search engine. You know they're watching you, recording your every passing curiosity, but you may feel helpless to prevent it. Today, search engine Ixquick (www.ixquick.com) is changing all that with a radical new breakthrough: Totally anonymous web searches.

Ixquick has announced technical changes to its website that now allow visitors to search the web in complete and total anonymity. The company will no longer log visitor IP addresses, even briefly, and therefore cannot link a visitor with his or her searches. The company plans to guarantee its new policy through independent third-party certification.

"We're the only major search engine in the Internet that can make that promise," said Ixquick CEO Robert Beens. "We've always been a privacy-friendly company, but now we're seriously upping the ante. We feel people have a fundamental right to privacy and we're delivering on our promise to provide it."

Ixquick is more than just a privacy lover's dream -- it is also one of the most powerful search engines on the Internet. Ixquick's proprietary metasearch process combines results from up to a dozen other search engines, returning only the most relevant results from each.

The Dutch company has attracted a growing worldwide fan base of web users concerned about the privacy policies of major search engines like Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Those engines register the time of your searches, the terms you used, the sites you visited and your IP address.

In many cases this IP address makes it possible to trace the computer, and in turn the household, that carried out the search. This data is routinely recorded and combined into personal and behavioral profiles, which can be retained up to eighteen months.

"We disapprove of those practices," says Richard Beens, "which is why we do things differently at Ixquick." Prior to today's announcement, the company deleted the privacy details of its users within 48 hours.

Ixquick also enhances privacy by offering connections using the secure "https" protocol over SSL to prevent eavesdropping on its users. The company is planning to launch a "proxy" service within the next few months that will make it possible to visit other websites in full anonymity.

"We're very proud of our new initiatives," says Beens. "They are the ultimate proof that we live up to our promises. If people search with Ixquick - they get the best results - in full privacy."

About Ixquick

Ixquick.com is the world's most private search engine. The company's innovative privacy policy and stringent data handling practices have been certified by an independent third-party auditor. Ixquick is the first and only search engine to earn the prestigious European Privacy Seal, awarded for adherence to exemplary privacy standards.

Ixquick is owned by Surfboard Holding BV, a Dutch company. Further information on Ixquick can be found at www.ixquick.com. Further information on the EU Privacy Seal can be found at http://www.european-privacy-seal.eu/about-europrise

but I've installed it as my default SE. Thought some of the techies here might have offer some pros/cons.

more, and reasonable discussion here -

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/01/28/did-holder-promise-no-prosecutions/#comments

or touch sig

It'll be "interesting" to see how this plays out (again and again)

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/18063.html

Obama lawyers set to defend Yoo

Next week, Justice Department lawyers are set to ask a San Francisco federal judge to throw out a lawsuit brought against Yoo by Jose Padilla, a New York man held without charges on suspicion of being an Al Qaeda operative plotting to set off a “dirty bomb.”

The suit contends that Yoo’s legal opinions authorized Bush to order Padilla’s detention in a Navy brig in South Carolina and encouraged military officials to subject Padilla to aggressive interrogation techniques, including death threats and long-term sensory deprivation.

That’s not all. On Thursday, Justice Department lawyers are slated to be in Charleston, S.C., to ask a federal magistrate there to dismiss another lawsuit charging about a dozen current and former government officials with violating Padilla’s rights in connection with his unusual detention on U.S. soil, without charges or a trial.

Not lately, though. I wonder if they still have that plank in there about "eliminating the myth of the Separation between Church and State"?

Troglodytes. The whole lot.

...and substitute "terrorism" everywhere MLK says "communism".

"Incandescently clear". Never heard that phrase before.