Microsoft Offers Privacy Options for its Search Engine
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Thereâs nothing like a little regulatory scrutiny to get Internet companies talking about privacy. Even if some of their words ring somewhat hollow.
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Online search companies Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and Microsoft are tightening their privacy policies in the face of mounting public, congressional and regulatory agency concern about the vast amounts of personal data they gather and store.
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Microsoft on Thursday officially unveiled the new beta version of its MSN Search site, the company&#39;s hotly anticipated attempt to take on Google for Web searching.
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Microsoft Corp. last week released a preview version of its new Internet search engine. It will be available in its final form early next year.
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In a privacy first among major search engines, the service will let its users decide how long their queries will be retained.
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Google's new Google Desktop Search tool raises a number of search privacy issues. In this article, we'll look at some of the usual specters of search privacy plus some new things people should consider.
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SEATTLE - The latest search engine from Google could turn out to be a privacy nightmare! Once installed in a computer running Windows XP or Windows 2000 (with Service Pack 3 or higher), the Google Desktop
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Revamped search engine allows users to store and share results.
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SEATTLE Microsoft launches Web search technology today that it hopes will give it a share of the market dominated by Google. The new search engine will initially be available only on a special test site.
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Tomorrow, Microsoft finally releases the beta version of its proprietary search engine. For over a year, webmasters and SEOs have seen evidence of MSNbot spidering their sites as MSN-Search gathered information and compiled its database.
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Microsoft is planning to introduce its long-awaited Internet search engine on Thursday, a person knowledgeable about the announcement said.
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Hopping on the privacy-protection bandwagon, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are limiting how long their Internet search engines retain potentially sensitive data about their users.
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Microsoft launches Web search technology Thursday that it hopes will give it a share of the market dominated by Google. The new search engine will initially be available only on a special test site.
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Microsoft Corp. finally debuted its own Web search technology on Thursday, hoping to challenge Google Inc.'s long dominance of the field with results tailored to a user's location and answers from its Encarta encyclopedia.
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Ask hopes a tool which erases search history will prove a winner with consumers concerned about privacy.
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Just like Ask.com Unable to keep up with Google's market share, the other big search engines are determined to top its privacy policies. Last week, Ask.com announced new software that keeps web searches completely anonymous - a first among major search engines - and now Microsoft and Yahoo! have unveiled their own brand-spanking-new privacy principles.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft is joining Ask.com in offering Web surfers a way to use its search engines anonymously, and the two companies are now calling on the search and online advertising industry to develop a common set of privacy practices. By year's end, Microsoft will give users a way to search anonymously on its Microsoft Windows Live Web sites, and it will also implement a new data retention policy that after 18 months will scrub all search query data of any information that could be used to identify the searcher. "We think that we as an industry ought to take a look at ways to further enhance privacy protections," said Microsoft Chief Privacy Strategist Peter Cullen. "We're really trying to make sure that people always have the ability to have a trusted experience." These steps areÂ similar to those taken by Ask.comÂ last week and are part of an effort to create industry consensus on privacy practices, Cullen said. When visitors use Microsoft's Windows Live search engine, Microsoft stores the search queries along with some information on the person doing the searching in order to provide them with targeted advertising. Like all the major search providers, Microsoft doesn't associate names or e-mail addresses with this data, but it does keep IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and some other identifying information, such as the zip codes of Windows Live users. Privacy advocates are concerned that this data could be misused. "Search terms are often about drugs, they're about sex and they're about rock and roll," said Peter Swire, a law professor with Ohio State University who was the White House's Chief Counselor for Privacy under the Clinton administration. "There are a lot of people who are feeling that they're doing a private exploration and wouldn't want their search terms as part of their permanent record." Last year, AOLÂ researchers inadvertently illustrated how this data could be misused when theyÂ posted data on about 650,000 searchesÂ made on the company's Web site. New York Times reporters were able to track down one of the searchers based on the information in the database. Ask.com and Microsoft's announcements put pressure on Google to improve its privacy practices, Swire said. Google retains part of the IP address associated with searches and has not promised to provide anonymous searching, he explained. It is becoming even more important for companies to safeguard consumers' privacy as the online advertising and search industries consolidate, Swire said. Both Microsoft and Google have made major moves in this space over the past few months with their plannedÂ acquisitions of aQuantiveÂ andÂ DoubleClick. More pressure is coming from the European Union, which has placed limits on the amount of time search companies can retain this type of data and isÂ reviewing Google's DoubleClick acquisition. Microsoft and Ask.com will invite privacy advocates and Internet search and advertising companies such as Google, AOL, and Yahoo to come together and more clearly explain how the industry will handle privacy. "The first step is, we'll be in contact with all the other players in this space and talk about what a summit might look like," said Cullen. "We're very happy to host it, if that's the answer ... both Microsoft and Ask.com think that this is the time to make this happen." The two companies expect to report on the results of this outreach by September. That's right around the time that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to host a workshop discussing these same issues, Swire said. "Now we're getting public debate and corporate debate on best practices. And the FTC will be trying to push that this fall." Â