What is Search Encrypt and Why Should You Use It?

Most people use a big search engine for searching the web and finding answers to their questions. There is a catch with these big search engines: They track you.

What is Search Encrypt?

Search Encrypt is a private search engine. It works like any other search engine: just type in your search term and hit enter. However, with Search Encrypt your search privacy is protected. Rather than gathering your information and using it to serve ads or deliver filtered search results, we don’t store any of your personally identifiable data.

Our developers created Search Encrypt with privacy as its core feature. It encrypts your search term, expires your browsing history — all to protect your data.

Non-Private Search Engines Use Your Data for “Customization”

These big search engines that have tons of data about you claim to use your data to offer a unique experience tailored to your needs. This is only part of the truth. Search engines with big advertising networks also use your data to target ads. While “more relevant” ads may seem like a user-friendly feature, they are actually big tech companies’ way of influencing consumer behavior.

Private search engines still offer user-friendly search engines, without using your data profile to tailor their products. The results and the ads you see are based on your search term, and that’s it.

Why Should You Use Search Encrypt?

We don’t track your search history in any user identifiable way. There is inherent risk in using platforms that track your information. This risk falls on both the service and you. If the service stores your data, it is their responsibility to protect it and keep it private, and if it gets hacked or leaked the business will see negative effects. If you use the internet irresponsibly, your information could fall into the wrong hands. This could lead to identity theft, or any number of issues.

We Offer More Objective Search Results

Without storing your past search data we can’t use that information to influence which results you see. Big search engines’ algorithms determine which links you’re likely to click on, and only displays those results. This creates a “filter bubble” effect, where you are only shown websites that you likely already agree with. This has negative effects on the political system because it causes polarization of ideas.

We Only Offer a Search Engine

Unlike big search engines, which are associated with massive ad networks and entire suites of products, we only offer a search engine. This means we don’t try to make you use multiple services to collect your data. If you use an email account that is associated with a search engine, your searches can be linked to your email which only makes your data profile more complete — giving big search engines more power.

Big search engines and social media websites use their many products to collect data about their users. People could be under the impression that Facebook isn’t tracking them, when they’re really using other Facebook products like Instagram or WhatsApp.

Privacy Tools Are User-Friendly

If Google makes the large majority of its revenue from targeted advertising, they have no incentive to stop collecting user data. It’s business model relies on your personal information to charge advertisers more. Privacy tools, like Search Encrypt, are more likely to act in their users’ best interests because they don’t rely on user data to make more money.

Large platforms like Facebook and Google make more money if they collect more data about people. Unfortunately this data can be used against people. Two examples are price gouging (charging you more if your data profile indicates that you’re willing to pay more), turning data over to law enforcement, or losing your data in breaches or hacks.

So, How Does Search Encrypt Make Money?

When you use our search engine, there are a few ads that show up above over below your search results. The ads you see are based solely on the search term you entered. We’ll never follow you around the internet with targeted ads.

Conclusion

We want to make the internet better for people, not big tech companies. Making the internet more private and empowering users by letting them control their own data, limits the power of giant tech companies. If just a small percentage of internet users choose our private search engine, we can start helping people stay private.

Originally published at choosetoencrypt.com on April 24, 2018.