Cuil's privacy policy

Yesterday a new search engine, Cuil.com, was unveiled, billing itself as an alternative to Google. Cuil (pronounced "cool") claims to have a database three times larger than Google's, to give results in an easier to use format, and to respect users' privacy more than other search engines. I haven't decided yet if Cuil gives more results or is easier to navigate, but its privacy policy is way better than Google's.

The best thing about Cuil is that it does not keep logs of user activities. It does not track people's IP addresses or use cookies to keep track of what we search for. The only thing Cuil uses cookies for is to remember settings that users have chosen. Even then, Cuil's servers don't record the information contained in the cookies.

I think all search engines should have similar privacy policies to Cuil's. Google, for instance, creates logs of each user's entire search history, identifiable by their IP address, and waits longer than a year to delete this data. Ask.com and Ixquick.com, on the other hand, are pretty good about privacy. Ixquick deletes IP addresses from their logs within 48 hours so that the data is completely anonymous. Ask has created a tool called the Ask Eraser which, when enabled, ensures that your IP address, cookie data, and search terms will be deleted from their logs within hours.

Will Google ever follow suit in respecting users' privacy rights? I hope they do, but right now they have such a large share of the market that they might not have much of an incentive. So many people use Google as the default tool for everything, from searching to medical records to email, and don't seem to care how much data Google knows about them. I, for one, just might start using Cuil sometimes instead of Google.