Ask.com’s AskEraser Sets a Privacy Benchmark
December 11th, 2007 — Dan Endy
If there was ever a doubt in your mind about the folks at Ask.com and their desire to become the search engine of choice, they just got better. On Monday Ask.com added a very cool new element to its site: AskEraser.
AskEraser enables you to have greater control over your search data. More specifically, AskEraser allows you to keep your search activity from being tracked — and with a simple click — it erases Ask.com cookies and stops recording your search history.
In this day and age where online privacy is so vitally important, this is a pretty neat little application for Ask.com’s battle with its better-know brethren, Google and Yahoo. Despite the fact that today’s web is increasingly more personalized, this is still a smart move. With the brouhaha surrounding the Facebook Beacon debacle, and subsequent Clinton-like public apology by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, this looks like a move made specifically with the user experience as the driving force. Ask.com is in effect saying, “you’ve asked for it, and we’ve delivered.”
From a monetization standpoint, Ask.com is clearly leaving the potential for targeted advertising dollars on the table and instead looks like the uber responsible party, concerned about its users. And that’s pretty refreshing.
It will be interesting to see how or if some of the other search engines respond, or if some of the social networks try to do likewise.
