After Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, Internet privacy is on everyone’s minds. One way in particular that people are looking for privacy is through their search engines. Google and Bing’s business models depend on using your search requests to serve up personalized ads. Alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo have tried to fight this by promising not to track its users. A new search engine, called Disconnect, is tackling search privacy with a different approach. Instead of trying to build its own search engine, which would have difficulty competing against Google or Bing, Disconnect routes your searches through a proxy before the major search engines receive your request. This way, it looks to Google or Bing like the search request is coming from Disconnect and they never know any information about you.
“What search engine you use is sometimes a very tough habit to break and a lot of people who are privacy fans are still addicted to Google or Bing,” Disconnect CEO Casey Oppenheim told GigaOm. “This is a way you can continue to use the search engine of your choice and get privacy when you want it.”
The search engine first launched as a desktop browser plugin last October, but is launching on Monday as a webpage and as an Android app. According to Information Week, an iOS app is on its way.
A video of how the Disconnect works is embedded below:
