About Search Encrypt
Who is Search Encrypt?
Search Encrypt is a leading private search engine that was designed from the ground up with user privacy as our main goal. We provide industry leading local search privacy by encrypting your search terms as well as expiring search links in your browser history. Search Encrypt is hosted on US servers and provide services to over 10 million users worldwide.
How Search Encrypt Protects Your Searches
1. Encrypted search terms
Consider this scenario — you’re researching wedding rings for that special someone and want to search the web for options. You also share a computer with that special someone and you don't want to spoil the surprise if they were to look at your search history. This is where Search Encrypt's first privacy feature comes in. We locally encrypt search terms before they’re sent to our servers so when your loved one looks at your browser history, there is no search for that ring.
2. Locally expiring browsing history
If you’re like most people, after searching for something sensitive you might forget to clear your browsing history prior walking away from your computer. This is where our second layer of privacy comes in. After 30 minutes of inactivity, we expire your browsing history, meaning if someone clicked a Search Encrypt link in your history an hour later, the search will be expired with no trace.
3. Over the wire encryption
Since we encrypt all search terms before they're sent over the wire, even if your network is insecure, your searches will be. In addition, our site, and the storage cookies that we use to store your expiring encryption keys, operates strictly over SSL through HTTPS, so that the requests and data sent out are doubly secure. Furthermore, all of our servers are located in highly secured, US based data centers.
How our users use Search Encrypt
70% of all our users either navigate directly to SearchEncrypt.com or modify their browser search settings to us, Search Encrypt. We have found this is the preferred method to utilize our privacy features.
Additionally, we have a supplemental browser extension for Chrome & Firefox that adds a 4th layer of privacy on top of the three mentioned above. With our privacy-based extension installed, when a user finds themselves on a website where their search privacy may be compromised, we prominently notify the user that we will protect their privacy by redirecting them to our privacy enhanced search engine, where they benefit from all the privacy features mentioned above. Our supplemental browser extension is simple and quick to install and un-install through the browser web stores.
Looking forward
Over 10 million users rely on Search Encrypt to help safeguard their privacy. Our engineers will continue to enhance the privacy features of the product, combat bad actors, and do everything we can to protect our users' privacy.