I’ve recently become increasingly bothered about the level of surveillance that we’re all under on the net. Maybe it was the news that a Twitter user was yesterday arrested based on (quite serious) threats made in his Tweets (it’s not that i think he should be ignored – just that i felt uncomfortable with thinking about the extent of intrusion required for such things to be possible).
Or maybe it was the number of recent Facebook, Google or Twitter leaks and bugs which compromised the privacy of their users. Regardless of what it was I decided to have a look for ways in which I can continue to use the net – but have a little more control over my information. That’s where Yauba comes in…
Yauba offers users an alternative to Google, Yahoo or any of the other majority search engines, in that it does not store user data, track search records or monitor patterns to deliver targeted ads. This in fact is the very point – it is the world’s first privacy-safe real time search engine. So far so good – the concept works for me, but I can’t help a few little things niggling away at the back of my mind.
The first is that, since Yauba is still in early beta mode, it is not quite yet massively useful. Not to say that is useless, just that i found it tricky to locate many sites via search that Google instantly delivers. But in time this should improve and arguably, even if it can never match Google’s powerful algorithms, Yauba should be able to take users off its rivals as long as it can get close to this level of results (I for one would happily accept the trade-off for the sake of my privacy).
The other problem however is a bit more inherent in the very concept of Yauba. Since it gathers no data the whole endeavour sadly lacks financial viability. After all, search engines are very expensive to run, and if you have no product (i.e. Google’s mass of data) then it’s hard to raise funds to operate. In addition services like Google trends – which admittedly are very useful – are always going to be unmatched by engines such as Yauba.
Finally one hopes that the folk at Yauba do have a policy whereby certain exceptional search terms do trigger the surveillance trackers – i’m talking about terms connected to illegal activities whatever they may be.
All in all though, Yauba is a refreshing concept and one that I truly hope goes on to establish itself on the web 2.0 landscape. One thing is for sure – the people behind it are not wrong to figure that there is a demand out there for online services that buck the trend and choose not to monitor their users every thought and move.
Dejan Levi
