If you're concerned about your privacy, you'll know that search engines generally keep fairly close tabs on you and your searches. There are a number of search engines available that don't track you, such as DuckDuckGo and Ixquick. Now there's a new kid on the block - Zeekly. It pulls results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, YouTube and so on, and provides this information 'to you in a safe and secure environment that protects your privacy'.
At first glance it looks good - there are options to search the web, images, video, news, Amazon, sports, audio, forums, wikis, blogs, pdfs and a dictionary, so it's really quite comprehensive. It also has an advanced search function for keyword, phrase, domain, exclude word/domain, which isn't brilliant, but it'll do.
However, once you start to delve below the surface, things are not quite as rosy. It doesn't tell you where it's pulled its results from; if I'm using a meta search engine I rather like to know that. The ranking system used is quite bizarre. I did a search for my name - the first hit was for the baseball player - which is quite common, but the second result was for 'Phil and Derek's continental cuisine', and Zeekly seems to be working on words in the URL and title, but it was only picking up 'Phil', and not the actual phrase that I'd put in. In fact, it seemed to ignore my phrase search entirely, which wasn't impressive. There's a 'quick look' option, which pulls the website page into the results for you to take a look at, and this only worked some of the time, and it was really quite slow.
I took my search across to images, and as some of you know, I have a namesake who is something of an upstanding member of the adult film industry, if you get my drift. I blinked a few times I have to say. There's no option to have a safe search, so given the number of adult images for just about any term you like, it renders the image search virtually unusable in a work or educational environment. The same goes for the video search option as well.
Overall, it was quite a disappointing search engine, and one that promised so much at the outset.
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