There is a new search engine on the block – Privado.
Privado’s main selling point is the fact that it's private, hence the name.
The Privado search engine doesn’t store personal information; this includes your IP address. They don’t use any cookies or any means of tracking such as pixels.
On their website, they state that ‘in order to eliminate the ability to extract the search term, we encrypt the search term, and it becomes unreadable in the browser’s history’.
This means that your search history is kept private, resulting in search engines being unable to build up a profile for you. This profile is normally then used to target you for specific ads and to customise your search results to suit your past habits and interests.
For some the introduction of Privado is welcomed, for others, they may feel that it’s a bit over the top. After all, if you are just searching for pictures of cats then why not let search engines know this.
Whatever you may personally feel about the use of private search engines like Privado its great to know that this option exists should you want to use it.
What does this mean for businesses and their ecommerce sites?
Privado is mostly bad news for some businesses and their ecommerce sites.
This new search engine will stop you from seeing what lead people to find your website in the first place, a useful piece of information for many. It will also stop you from being able to re-target or re-market to website visitors, something that does have a high success rate.
At the end of the day, if Privado grows in popularity then businesses will have to take further punts in the dark and rely more on in-house conducted questionnaires to existing customers to help them work out what is working and what is not.
Certainly not the end of the world, but definitely something to factor into future marketing plans.
Published: 20th Jul 2020