SearchScene gets a privacy and speed boost!

As of July 2021, SearchScene is officially out of beta! We’ve just signed a direct contract with Microsoft Bing for our baseline search results, which means we’ve been able to significantly increase the privacy of our search engine. We’ve always strived for maximum privacy and we never stored our users’ search queries or their IP addresses, but signing a direct contract with Bing has enabled us to go much further. We’ve also been working hard to increase the speed of delivery of our search results, which is now significantly faster than it was before.

 

A rock-solid privacy policy

 

At SearchScene, we take your privacy seriously…

  • We don’t store your search terms
  • We don’t store your IP address or any of your personal data
  • We don’t sell your data to advertisers (we have nothing to sell)
  • All your searches are encrypted
  • We don’t track you across the web (all our search ads are non-personalised)
  • We automatically delete our web host’s server logs every day (no other search engine does this!)
  • Unlike most large websites, we don’t use Google Analytics (or any other tracking software)
  • We actively prevent “search leakage” – websites you visit from our search results will never see your search terms
  • If you sign-in to SearchScene, we encrypt your email address (and don’t even ask you for a password)
  • Our iOS and Android apps remove cross-site tracking cookies, social trackers, cryptominers and fingerprinters from every website you visit!

Check out our privacy features in full here!

 

SearchScene is now faster than ever!

SearchScene is now faster than ever. We’ve added a server in the UK, which has meant an immediate 50% speed boost to our UK and European users. We use proximity steering to direct US and Canadian users to our US server and direct UK and European users to our UK server, with failover between the two in order to ensure 100% uptime. In addition to that, we’ve improved the way we serve up our knowledge panels, making them more than twice as fast as they were before. Requests to Wikipedia for information were always a bottleneck, so we’ve managed to cut in half the number of requests we make, improved our caching mechanism and no longer allow Wikipedia requests to block the rest of the search results from displaying. All in all, SearchScene is now around 5-10 times faster than it was before!

 

Help us ramp up our traffic!

As we are now out of beta, it’s finally time to start ramping up our traffic so that we can significantly increase our donations to the charities that we support. The next few months are cruicial to our success and the cost of spreading the word via advertising is extremely expensive, so please help us out by sharing SearchScene with your family and friends. Together, we can really make a difference! Thank you!