Privacy for Internet Searches
/For privacy reasons, I recommend that you switch to Bing www.bing.com, Microsoft's search engine, from Google www.google.com
For even more privacy, switch to DuckDuckGo.com. They don't store your search history. But the search results sometimes aren't as relevant.
While both Google and Bing collect and retain your history of internet searches, Microsoft Bing's retention policy is more favorable to you than Google's.
Bing's Privacy Policy
When you conduct a search, Microsoft collects the following:
* Search term and time and date of your search
* IP address, browser configuration and your location
* Any unique identifiers contained in the cookies
We store search terms (and the cookie IDs associated with search terms) separately from any account information that directly identifies the user, such as name, e-mail address, or phone numbers. We have technological safeguards in place designed to prevent the unauthorized correlation of this data and we remove the entirety of the IP address after 6 months, cookies and other cross session identifiers, after 18 months.
Google Privacy Policy
Multiple Internet searches using both Google and Bing failed to reveal any clear explanation by Google about its current policy regarding the length of time that Google retains information it collects about your use of Google services. The words "retain" and "retention" do not appear in Google's published Privacy Policy.
"We use the information we collect from all of our services ... to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads."
"We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services...."
But I like a clean search page, not one full of distractions. There are enough distractions already on the Internet! The Bing search page always opens with a row of pictures at the bottom, Bing's "Popular Now" with news headlines. Distracting!
There is no Microsoft Bing option to hide the Popular Now photographs by default. It doesn't take long to disable them. Set your Homepage to:
https://www.bing.com/?rb=0
