While Yahoo recently announced plans to join Google and Bing in retaining search logs for 18 months, Blekko has gone in the opposite direction, announcing that searches conducted on Blekko and other personal information such as IP addresses will be deleted within 48 hours – even for logged-in users.
Privacy is a big debate these days in search and social, but Blekko makes its philosophy clear: search engines know too much about their users, and it’s possible to improve a search engine without storing private information. Additionally, Blekko’s new privacy includes:
- HTTPS Preferred system: Users who click on a search result will be automatically be taken to HTTPS (secure) websites (e.g., ecommerce, financial, or other sites that collect personal information) if available.
- Ad opt-out: Blekko users can choose to search without seeing any advertisements via the NoAds privacy setting and further reduce “the already small amount of logging of users’ queries by blekko” with the SuperPrivacy option.
Blekko, which launched in November, is also continuing to slowly grow its user base. In April, 750,000 unique visitors conducted more than 50 million searches on the search engine – up from 30 million queries in January.
Topix, the local news and commentary site, tapped Blekko earlier this month to power its search results. Blekko has also announced partnerships with Stack Overflow and Merchant Circle.