Keep research under wraps by searching on Clusty.com

by John McCormick | Mar 06, 2006 9:45:00 PM

Tags: SEARCH, Government, John McCormick, Clusty.com, search engine, Google Inc., Vivisimo Inc., IT Locksmith Newsletter

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Takeaway: It's been a quiet week on the security front, and that's always a good time to think about security best practices. One area of data security that many people overlook is the security of searching on the Web. In this edition of IT Locksmith, John McCormick takes a look at Clusty.com, a search engine that keeps your research private.

Are Google, MSN, and Yahoo! watching your company's research? Yes.

Do governments have access to a lot of these records? Yes.

Does this concern you? If you said no, then you probably aren't paying attention.

Details

It's been a quiet week on the security front, which offers a good opportunity to explore some security best practices. One data security issue users rarely think about is search security—in other words, when you search for something on the Web, who knows about it?

Several mainstream search engines have been in the news lately concerning their censorship and data retention practices. However, hot search engine Clusty.com doesn't bow to censors or collect detailed information on searches.

Considering all of the concern that encryption and lost data are getting these days, it simply amazes me how little thought companies give to who might be looking at the research they're doing on the Internet. Most search engines keep vast databases about every contact with users. Anyone who gains access to these files can learn a great deal about individuals, companies, and any research they're doing. That includes research on competitors, new product ideas, pricing, and other confidential topics.

Although Google recently put up a fight to keep search records from the federal government, some other search engines quickly yielded vast amounts of data. In fact, many search engines assist repressive governments in locating dissidents, so they must be tracking the origin and content of searches. However, there's one free search engine that collects only minimal information—and it goes by the strange name of Clusty the Clustering Engine.

Clusty.com is so advanced that Vivisimo, the company behind the technology, has a contract to organize all public access to U.S. government information through the FirstGov.gov Web site—a job so big that the company took on Microsoft as a subcontractor. But, while impressive, there's a far more important security reason why you should familiarize yourself with this search engine.

While Clusty servers have to record some information and obviously must log the initial query to perform a search, they do not log which search results a user follows. Many people don't realize that after the initial search, most search engines also pass follow-up selections through their servers before sending along a request to the source.

For example, if you search for poison on Google, it records all of your selections. Clusty.com doesn't do that—so there's no record of whether you're reading about poison ivy or arsenic.

What that means is that if Clusty.com's owners get a subpoena for search records, they actually have no detailed records to turn over—the ultimate in secure research. (Of course, clicking one of the few sponsored links will obviously record that information, which is how they bill advertisers.)

Those of you in countries that require Google and other sites to censor search results—or who do business with people in such countries—should note Clusty.com's statement on censorship: "Neither Clusty.com nor Vivisimo.com censors search results. That is, neither site removes from its output, in an ad-hoc manner, politically-oriented search results that would otherwise appear and that would be objectionable to governments or would be unlawful in unelected, non-democratic regimes."

In contrast, consider Google's announcement in January that it would censor content on its Chinese Web sites to meet Chinese government requirements. In addition, reports have also surfaced that Google and Yahoo have helped China jail dissidents and removed e-mail and blog services from Chinese sites. According to The Register, Microsoft has blocked searches on such dangerous words as democracy and freedom from the Chinese MSN site.

The most insidious thing about censorship is that the governments that force it on companies might also forbid those companies from telling the affected users about such practices. And in my opinion, if there's anything worse than censorship, it's secret censorship.

If you've never tried Clusty.com, I think it will amaze you how quickly you can find the information you want. Instead of providing results based on popularity, Clusty.com sorts them both for relevance and places them into categories.

For example, if you search for Americans with Disabilities Act, Clusty indexes results so you can go directly to Employment, Rights, Technical Assistance, or whichever category you're interested in. By the way, Clusty offers both Internet Explorer and Firefox toolbars.

So, take some time and explore Clusty.com, and don't miss the search engine's special features. Particularly, check out Clusty Jobs, which lets you sort jobs by title and location. You can even search by keyword and ZIP code. Whether you're looking for a job or you're an employer trying to gauge the employment market, this feature can provide a wealth of information.

Final word

My final word this time is a disclaimer: I personally know the founders of Clusty.com—they are all from Carnegie Mellon University in nearby Pittsburgh. However, I should also point out that I am a certified Google Answers researcher and that I have no financial connection with Clusty.com.

Of course, Clusty.com is completely free for users, so I feel comfortable recommending this great search site with its very impressive user-friendly technology to all my readers. Personally, this is the only place I would conduct sensitive research, and I recommend it to all of my clients. And I'm not its only fan: Time magazine listed Clusty.com as one of the top 50 Coolest Web sites of 2005.

Also watch for …

Sophos has published its list of the top 10 viruses and hoaxes reported to the company in February, 2006.
Vnu.net has reported the first proof of concept virus that can move from PCs to mobile devices. It works on Windows devices Microsoft's ActiveSync synchronization software.
Oracle has released a rush patch for E-Business Suite 11i. The fix must be important because the company normally releases patches only four times per year.

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John McCormick is a security consultant and well-known author in the field of IT, with more than 17,000 published articles. He has written the IT Locksmith column for TechRepublic for more than four years.

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