It might surprise you to know how much information about you is going out even when you perform a simple task like using a search engine. In the previous post, there was a mention of cookies, and nobody loves cookies more than search engines. Cookies are how search engines can track your behavior on the internet and this info is mighty useful for marketing purposes. Now we cannot deny how useful search engines really are, but exactly how much privacy are we willing to lose over them?

The answer to these questions may very well be in the form of proxy servers which hide your IP address, thereby making it impossible for a server, any server, to figure out where exactly you are on the internet. Simplified: if the search engine can't locate your computer, it definitely cannot send you a cookie. For those who find using proxy servers a little too ‘techie' you can try many features available in some of the browsers and search engines. 

Ixquick, a popular Dutch meta-search engine offers you complete privacy over the internet by not storing your IP address on their servers, thereby not sending you cookies at all. Most search engines save cookies on your computer for at least 3 months, but Ixquick has always been deleting cookies within 48 hours. As of late, Ixquick no longer needs to store cookies at all on the browser. Thus, Ixquick is quite a safe choice when you're looking up sensitive information and quite important too when your kids are browsing. 

Ixquick is also the first search engine to offer such privacy to its users and won the EuroPrivacy Award in 2008. However, the privacy lasts only between the PC you're searching from and the Ixquick server. The moment you click on any of the search results, you are now connected to their server, and thus no longer private. Thus, if you're looking at really sophisticated protection, then thus far proxy servers seem to be the best bet. And for the technically-challenged they've become quite simple now.