The Anonymous Open metasearch engine

The Anonymous Open metasearch engine

201711337 Adnan Haddad         

201710828 Hazem Hassanein   

201520357 Luqman Badri           

201710733 Omar Abdelhamid   

In an information age where vast amounts of data are shared every second, it has become increasingly hard to preserve personal data and privacy online. Many tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. are leveraging end users’ data for material gains (profit, page visitors, ad revenue, etc.) Leaving millions of users unaware of how their data is being used and could potentially lead to risks such as identity theft as well as other cybercrimes.

Google has become the standard for surfing the web with a market share of over 90%. Whenever anything online is to be found, the first answer is Google. This monopoly, while benefiting private companies like Google or Microsoft (which endorses Bing, its own competitive search engine) is not the most efficient solution. The internet contains a lot more information than what Google or Bing, or other famous search engines portray, which are profit-oriented rather than user-oriented. But then the relevant question becomes “What is an all-in-one solution for querying the internet?” One answer is querying results regarding one topic from many known and unknown search engines using a metasearch engine.

There have been many instances where organizations in power, control or dictate what type of information users receive, in situations where it is either beneficial for big tech companies or their partners. This goes against the integrity and validity of the search engine, creating bias, which indirectly censors information. There have been notable cases where Google tried to skew political opinions using search results during an election which raised a lot of red flags and drew attention to unethical practices that big tech companies use to take advantage of users’ personal data without their knowledge.