Popular VPN service Private Internet Access has teamed-up with GigaBlast to launch Private.sh, a new private search engine that uses cryptography to ensure that your search history cannot be tracked by anyone. GigaBlast, if you wonder, is one of the few companies to have their own index of the internet available for search.
Each of the two parties contributed their expertise to the partnership to provide what they say is a “new standard for cryptographically secured privacy for search engines.”
Your current search engine is tracking you
Search engines make their money by serving ads to users; the more targeted the ads – the more money they could make. And in order to be able to offer targeted ads, search engines are following that its users are searching for — not only during one session but all the time.
Furthermore, they also track where you click, where you are, on which page and any other data point they could collect. This helps search engines create digital profiles that could later be better targeted with relevant ads, and consequently – sold at a premium.
While that doesn’t sound nasty by itself, things can easily get out of control, and today Google knows more about you than your spouse or your best friend. And that is scary.
So, Private Internet Access and GigaBlast decided to do something about it, and offer an alternative service to the users. That’s where Private.sh kicks in as it was designed from the ground up to protect its users’ privacy.
How Private.sh protects your privacy?
With Private.sh, your search privacy is protected with both encryption and anonymity. When you enter a search term into Private.sh, it gets encrypted on your computer or other device using GigaBlast’s public key, which only they can decrypt. This, in turn, ensures that Private.sh never sees the search term.
From there, the search term is passed to the GigaBlast search engine through a Private.sh proxy making sure GigaBlast doesn’t see your location or IP address, browser information, and anything else that could allow for your privacy to be broken or a user profile to be created. This means that neither Private.sh nor GigaBlast is able to build a user profile on you or store your search history.
The final step involves encryption of the search results by GigaBlast using the temporary public key that is then returned to you through the Private.sh proxy. The results then get decrypted and rendered locally on your device using JavaScript with a temporary private key that only exists on your device. This client-side keypair is changed for every search request.
In a nutshell, these extra steps that are happening in the background — and which you won’t even notice — deliver the best possible private search experience.
Private search is just getting started…
You may wonder what are the benefits of a private search? For a start, you will always get objective results that were never influenced by your previous searches. That’s what Google and Bing do with their algorithms guessing what you may like. And while this may return better results, you should know that they [results] come with one big caveat — your privacy. And we think that’s more important than the slight benefit of more personalized search results.
Private Internet Access and GigaBlast end their announcement with a promise that they are just getting started. In the future, Private.sh will be working with GigaBlast to expand their index of the internet to bring more results — all with the idea to make Private.sh your private search engine of choice. Can’t help but love the idea. 😉
Pros
Cons
- Fast, reliable download and upload speeds
- Works great for Netflix and torrenting
- Dedicated Chrome and Firefox extensions
- Connect 10 devices simultaneously
- Doesn't work well in China