Privacy is a growing concern for many internet users, who fear that their details may fall into the hands of fraudsters, spammers, identity thieves or over-zealous government officials. From today, web users can cut out one part of their electronic paper trail.

The Ixquick search engine guarantees not to keep any personal data it gathers from searches. It will delete the IP address, a code that identifies each PC that accesses the site, and has designed a cookie that will not identify an individual user.

Cookies are small data files placed by websites onto computers that visit them. They allow websites to recognise individual users and display their chosen site set-up, but can also reveal to third parties which site a user has visited.

"When you search using Ixquick, your user information is not retained," Alex van Eesteren, a spokesman for the search engine, said. "We don’t keep any IP addresses and the cookies we use do not have a unique identity."

The company will keep some details on its log of searches so that it can trace the source of any attack against the site, but it promises to delete all identifiable information within 48 hours.

Mr van Eesteren denied that the search engine would attract criminals or others with something to hide. "When people are really bad they are always going to make themselves invisible," he said. "People can make use of special software that hides their IP addresses."

He said that Ixquick’s approach could help to reduce the potential for crime, as the company would not hold a large bank of data that might be attractive to criminals.

Yahoo!, AOL and MSN were criticised earlier this year for handing search records to the US Government, although the search engines removed data that would identify individual users before passing it to the authorities.

Google refused to comply with the subpoena, but it had experienced privacy-related controversy before when it launched Gmail, which electronically scans users’ e-mail messages in order to place targeted advertising on the page.

Mr van Eesteren said that Ixquick is not a direct competitor to Google, since it relies on the search engine to provide some of its results. Ixquick is a meta searcher, which aggregates the results from 12 engines, including Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN.

Meta search was popular in the early days of the internet but fell into decline as Google grew in dominance. Ixquick suggests that it may begin to grow again as people seek to sidestep the growing commercialisation of search engines though paid-for listings and search engine optimisation, though which websites attempt to manipulate their ranking.

"There’s no one who tries to cheat 12 search engines with search engine optimisation," Mr van Eesteren said.

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