Ixquick.com - A Meta Search Engine With Privacy Credentials
Ixquick.com is meta search engine that essentially consolidates results from many major search engines and web sites into one location.
Unlike other consolidation or aggregation search engines that just rehash the results from several of the major search engines, Ixquick takes this one step further by adding results from social media, news, and directory sites.
The Design
Now, Ixquick isn’t going to win any beauty contests, but the search results are well organized and easy to read. However, I do have to mention that the site looks like it was designed circa 1996 and hasn’t been touched since. (the earth image behind the logo is an especially 90’s touch)
The design is pretty standard… titles, links, and a short paragraph or intro from what looks like the meta data description of the site.
The Search Results
All the design side aside, let’s talk about the actual search results and sites it returns itself.
One interesting thing about Ixquick.com is it not only consolidates the search results from major engines and sites, it actually ranks the your results based on it’s popularity at other sites.
For example, let’s say you do a search for this site; “addoursearch”. The first result on Ixquick.com is www.addoursearch.com, because it’s the first result on 10 other search engines. This is demonstrated by the use of a set of star icons next to each result. The more stars, the more results are found on other search engines.
This approach to ranking the search results can be rather useful considering each search engine will present different results based on their own algorythms. So, in other words… it takes the group concensus as to what is the best result.
Privacy
One thing I’d like to mention is the sites privacy credentials. Since you’re searching other sites like Yahoo!, MSN, or Ask through the ixquick interface. This way, you don’t have to worry about the other sites recording your search data, IP address, and other possible information.
In addition to the “proxy-search” approach to privacy, Ixquick also claims that they delete all your information - like cookies, history, and ip address - once you leave the site.
The combination of these privacy features has won the site the European Privacy Seal. To be honest I’m not sure what that means… but, it sounds official.
Conclusion
So, if you’re looking for a good aggregating search engine, concerned about privacy, and really love the 90’s… give Ixquick.com a try. See how you like it for yourself.
