• July 15, 2008

Ixquick has become the first search engine to receive the European Privacy Seal. Issued by EuroPriSe, a consortium of nine privacy organizations backed by the European Commission, the seal guarantees that IT products and services comply with the EU's privacy and data security laws.

The Netherlands-based meta-search engine aggregates results from multiple sources, including Google, Yahoo and Live Search. Ixquick also grades each result according to its overall popularity with the other engines, and deletes users' personal info (including IP addresses and query history) within 48 hours.

"Ixquick has fulfilled all the EU's requirements," said Robert Beens, Ixquick's CEO. "This will certainly add fuel to the discussions between the EU and the larger search engines as our approval by the EU contradicts contentions that the EU recommendations are unrealistic or cannot be met."

--Tameka Kee