Peekier: This New Search Engine Protects Your Privacy
As all of us should know by now, searching on the web is not anonymous. Especially the top dogs of the search branch store lots of data regarding your search requests and even beyond that. Peekier doesn’t do that.
Huh!? Search Engines Know a Lot More About You Than You Think
Due to the pooling of useful services into one Google account, the search engine giant from Mountain View is the service that almost knows more about you than you do. Only if you own, and use, a Google account, that is. In your Google account, the data from all the different services is pooled, which allows for detailed evaluations.
But even if you only make use of the Californian search engine, while picking alternatives to the other services, you’re already disclosing a lot about yourself. Google uses cookies in order to be able to recognize you each time you visit. Google determines your preferences according to your search requests, and displays respectively fitting ads.
Should you be logged in while searching, you’ll obviously give the operator a lot more information than you would if you simply searched. Nonetheless, you’re still revealing your IP address, as well as the used browser, and your search requests are also stored.
The owners of the pages you clicked on in the search results also gain data from you. They know where you come from, and what you looked for. Now, they immediately place their own cookie, and a basic profile has been created.
Peekier Thwarts the Data Collection Frenzy
The brand new search engine Peekier has a very different way of handling the mentioned aspects. First off, it doesn’t place cookies, and doesn’t save your IP address or any other information.
The results are mainly taken from Bing, which is why you can actually consider Peekier as a true alternative to Google, just by looking at the quantity and quality of the search results. The search keywords are not saved, and aggregrated into a history either. However, they are stored for service purposes, but in a way that prevents them from being assigned to a user.
The data protection focus continues on the search result page. In contrast to other providers, Peekier gives you a preview of the website that you may want to visit. If you were to check the listed pages on Google, looking for specific information, you would have to call them up one by one, spreading your data on the web with a watering can, although, in most cases, the accessed page won’t even contain the information you were looking for.
This is different on Peekier. Here, you click the preview. Now, an overlay with the scrollable page content, which the search result would lead to, is opened. This is where you get to check if the page is actually relevant. Within the preview, all links are deactivated, preventing you from accidently jumping somewhere you didn’t want to go to.
The search results can be refined even more by clicking one of the tags that Peekier integrates into the search bar, as soon as the search results are set. As usual, Peekier suggests keywords as soon as you start typing in the search bar.
If you decide that you want to call up a particular search result, this is done via the link above the preview window. At that point, the accessed page will know where you’re from, but not what you looked for.
On top of all the data protection features, Peekier simply looks good. The entirely flat design makes Peekier look more elegant than other search engines. Subtle animations show that the system is alive, and are visually pleasing. The search result page is displayed as a configurable grid, reminding me of Pinterest in a way.
Due to its card-based design, Peekier looks great on both desktop, and mobile devices. Even the detail preview works fine on mobile devices, allowing you to check out the page before actually visiting it.
See for yourself. The discussion on Peekier over at Hacker News is interesting as well.
