IxQuick, one of my favourite meta search engines and what it bills itself as “the world’s most private search engine†has renamed itself to Startpage. Name change apart, there is no difference in the existing search engine.
The meta search engine has been known for using privacy as a marketing feature, which set it part from many other search engines. In 2006, shortly before the mistaken release of three months of AOL search data, IxQuick announced that it would remove its users personal data within 48 hours. Last January, it stopped recording IP addresses completely and started offering secure searching via the https protocol, which further enhanced the search engine’s leadership in privacy. Big three search engines- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/Bing still keep user data for nine months, three months and eighteen months respectively.
