Dutch search engine wins first Euro-privacy award (News Feature)

By Rachel Levy Jul 14, 2008, 14:39 GMT

Amsterdam - Dutch search engine IxQuick Monday became the first company to receive the newly-established European Privacy Certificate.

The award, expected to become an important instrument in privacy and data protection legislation, was given to IxQuick by the European watchdog for data protection in Kiel, Germany.

'This certificate could not come at a better moment,' Ixquick CEO Robert Beens told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

'Just ten days ago a New York court ordered YouTube to transfer data it had stored, to Viacom. This incident only confirms what IxQuick has been saying for a long time - only erasing data can guarantee privacy.'

IxQuick is a so-called meta-search engine, available in 17 languages. It uses the search results of several search engines to provide its own list of search results.

But whereas other search engines store the Internet Provider (IP) addresses of its users on its servers - and leave so-called 'cookies' on each of the users' computers that track his or her search behavior - IxQuick does not do any of that.

All IP addresses and anonymized files are erased from its servers.

To avoid abuse of its search engine by search robots which perform automated searches on search engines to acquire addresses and privacy details, IxQuick erases IP addresses after 48 hours.

Beens says this is the timeframe needed for technicians to trace and block the IP addresses of the search robots. Anonymized files resulting from each search are erased after a maximum of 14 days.

Anonymized files, stored by all search engines, contain information about how many searches were done and in which languages. Search engines often use this data to optimize their search results.

IxQuick, founded in 1998, had already decided to stop storing privacy-sensitive data in 2006.

The decision was taken after Beens, a lawyer, discovered that a search company could be held liable for the information it had stored.

More important, Beens says, was that IxQuick simply 'believes in privacy and data protection. The speed at which people are becoming aware of the importance of privacy, is enormous. People understand more and more what happens to their privacy on the Internet today.'

Beens says IxQuick literally pays a price by not storing personal information. 'Not storing anonymized files reduces our income from advertisements substantially.

'# However, we hope to balance this loss of income with an increase in our search volume - the number of searches performed on our website. After all, our privacy protection provides us with a unique selling point.'

In the Netherlands, where Google dominates around 90 per cent of the Dutch search market, IxQuick is an intermediate player on the remaining 10 per cent of the search engine market, Beens says.

'Germany is our most important market,' says Beens. 'Recent studies found that more than 80 per cent of Germans feel threatened by the lack of privacy protection on the Internet.

'German legislation about privacy and data protection is more developed than anywhere else in the world. I think this is related, among others, to Germany's past with the Stasi, the former (East German) secret service.'

Ironically, the owners of Ixquick used to own the domain name of Dutch Google - the company much-criticized for storing personal information and using this personal information also in processing search results.

'One of IxQuick's founders bought the domain name as a joke, in the early days of Google. He had a hunch Google would become a big player.

'When the American company entered the Dutch market, they approached us and asked us to sell them the domain name - which we did.'