With the global dominance of Google (in the western world at least) these days, apart from the odd check of Bing or Yahoo, and the very occasional use-age of Dogpile if the information we want is really well hidden, and as we work with Google as the the dominant search engine of the decade, we mostly search with it too.

So it’s not often that we would really try another search engine over the last few years, much less one that wasn’t brand new, and likely launched in a blaze of marketing glory, but that’s what happened today, somehow we stumbled onto:

ixquick

..catchy name eh?  – but try it out (box below) – seriously it’s not bad at all, definitely better than Bing we reckon.

..It’s far from new, first reviewed in (er hem.. 2000..) its some kind of meta search engine, (like Dogpile et al) but that gives strangely “Googley” results, but without the recent serious concerns over personalization and user privacy as ixquick bills itself as “protecting your privacy”

From their privacy page here

Ixquick’s position:

	You have a right to privacy.
	Your search data should never fall into the wrong hands.
	The only real solution is quickly deleting your data or not storing them to begin with.
	In June 2006 we started to delete our users’ privacy data within 48 hrs.
	As of January 2009 we do not even record our users’ IP addresses at all anymore.
	We are the first and only search engine to do so.
	Our initiative is receiving an overwhelmingly positive response!

.

Ixquick will wholeheartedly continue on its mission to offer you great search results in the best possible privacy!

How refreshing is that?

We havent had time to thoroughly test it yet, its supposedly porting information from “the best of the rest” of the engines (below) but gives a familiar enough SERP to leave Google users happy we think?

..- So hang on, here’s a good search engine, with Google-y style and quality results, that allows webmasters to embed it in their sites, and who don’t require you to sign away all your privacy rights to use their service…

hmmm…..

Unfortunately, we have no clue how it works, so delivering superior seo results from it, may be a little while off yet..