In the last five years, privacy has grown into a major concern for anyone using the internet. When Edward Snowden, and other organizations, released information regarding how companies and the NSA, are tracking citizens, privacy became an even bigger issue. People have turned to many tools to protect themselves and their information. Among these, private Search engines have seen an increase in traffic recently.

In May 2017 Search Encrypt’s Alexa Ranking was 13,000 (the 13000th most visited website globally). Now, Search Encrypt‘s global ranking is 2,400. In the U.S. Search Encrypt is ranked 595. Another popular Private Search engine, DuckDuckGo, increased their rank from 470 in May up to 343 now. This increase in traffic for private search tools means that people are getting serious about protecting their personal data.

Private Search Engines

Private search tools, like Search Encrypt, have a different business model than big search engines. It’s a shame that Google and Bing feel that they have to track users to have success. Search Encrypt and other privacy-based search engines don’t track users and their information. Privacy and search engines can exist in unison, despite the popular belief that they can’t.

Google uses your internet use data to serve you “meaningful ads”. When it serves these ads, is Google really helping you? It seems more likely that these ads just encourage you to buy products that you probably don’t need.

How do private search engines make money?

Most secure or private search tools make money through ads and affiliate revenue. Search Encrypt does not serve ads based on your past searches, but displays ads based on your current search term. We don’t store any of your personal information or use it to target you with ads.

Because we have a different business model, we can deliver a more user-focused product. Google emphasizes positive user experiences and sells users on tailoring their web experiences. However, Google benefits from the huge amounts of data they get. Because privacy based products don’t share or track this, we focus more on making our search engine user-friendly.

Digital Privacy & Data Security

So much of the internet relies on trust between companies and consumers. However, in many cases companies share very little on how they collect, use and store your information. People can choose to keep hoping that Google will only use their data in ethical ways. But, there are no guarantees that this will happen. Another concern is how Google stores this information. While they are obligated to store it in a secure way, hacks could jeopardize huge amounts of information. Search Encrypt believes that users will be better off if this data is never even stored in the first place.

Too many people allow Google to convince them that sharing data is necessary to have good web experiences. We believe that if more websites and companies used products with full privacy by design, the internet would improve across the board. In the meantime, use these “8 Ways to Protect Your Digital Privacy” to avoid many issues.

The post Private Search Engines Boom in 2017 appeared first on Search Encrypt Blog.