better search engine: ixquick.com [LWN.net]

better search engine: ixquick.com

Posted Jan 27, 2010 14:11 UTC (Wed) by LintuxCx (subscriber, #14448)
In reply to: better search engine: ixquick.com by coriordan
Parent article: Ubuntu changes to Yahoo as default search provider

As long as you don't click on any of the ads, that is.

I looked at the HTML source, it looks like they're fetching the ads from Google themselves and then include them directly in their page (instead of including the ads as an object on the client side). It does mean they're slower, but that's hard to fix.

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better search engine: ixquick.com

Posted Jan 31, 2010 17:22 UTC (Sun) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]

I see 2 benefits of Ixquick:

1) when you click on a site from Google/Yahoo, the Referrer field will contain your search terms. So any site you clicked on can see what you searched for. Lots of Wiki sites will highlight the words you searched for if you came from Google/Yahoo. On Ixquik, they appear to use POST for search, so sites can't get your keywords.

2) They do use google ads (so Google gets your IP. Big deal, turn off your router for a day and you'll likely get a new one.) But they don't appear to be sending your keywords to Google (don't know if this is policy or not, but I didn't get any relevant ads, only ixquick banners from Google). So even if Google gets your IP, they don't appear to know what you're searching for.