I was asked to take a look at Motherpipe, which is a new search engine, which has an emphasis on privacy. I talked to the CEO Fred Cornell, and asked him a few questions about it.
"Where do you get your data from?" "We pull our data from Yahoo! Bing. We are also working on integrating outer sources of data, such as tweets for example."
"There are other privacy search engines out there. What makes yours different?" "I wouldn't take anything form ixquick or DuckDuckGo - that are great search engines. We use the same standard privacy approach as they do - SSL encryption, no logging or passing on of IP and no tracking cookies. What we hope that our users will like in addition to this is a clean layout with few ads (0-2) and up to 50 search results per page, servers based outside of US jurisdiction and no use of cookies at all. We are also very excited about integrating Twitter results and other data sources in the near future."
"You don't seem to have an advanced search function?" "As for advanced search, we offer a suite of standard features such as "site:" and Boolean operators such as "AND" and "OR". After having seen your list of advanced operators on your site, we will look into which ones we can deploy."
The interface is simple - the usual search box. There are options to search the US/.com version, a UK version, German and Swedish. The results page is very clean - I often found that I wasn't getting any advertising at all. Results were in the form of title, url, summary. There were further options to search images, news and blogs. It displayed well in Firefox and Chrome, but was a bit dodgy in IE, but given the reputation that IE has, that's not really a criticism.
To be honest - it's not a spectacularly different search engine, but the interesting part of Motherpipe is in what it doesn't do, rather than what it does. You'll get access to a search engine that doesn't keep details on what you are searching for, it doesn't store your IP address, it doesn't use cookies, it doesn't track you, it doesn't send your search term to the site you clicked on, it doesn't store or share your search history, and it doesn't share your personal information. If that's important to you, this is a search engine worth looking at.
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