Have you been looking for a privacy-focused search engine, wanting desperately to leave the “arms” of Google, Microsoft’s Bing, or Yahoo? Oscobo has you covered. This search engine (with an interesting name, nonetheless) is the privacy-focused search engine you’ve been waiting for. The UK search engine company, founded by a former BlackBerry (Rob Perin) and Yahoo employee (Fred Cornell), aims to keep your search life on the Web private. That’s right: the company doesn’t track anything about you, and their ads (there are still mobile ads, however), aren’t specific to you but to consumers as a whole. While you’ll still see these ads, you won’t see ads for NFL tickets if you do a Super Bowl search for your favorite team that’s in the championship.
The company asserts its commitment to privacy on its “About” page: “Oscobo is the only UK based Privacy Search Engine that does not track or store the user’s data. In fact we do not store ANY data on our users; Not when they use our site. Not when they leave. Not when they type words in. Not when they type come back.”
Rob Perin, a former BlackBerry employee, seems to be one of the more perfect choices to create a privacy-focused search engine. After all, BlackBerry as a manufacturer has always been committed to privacy. The company’s most recent smartphone, the BlackBerry Priv, is named “Priv” for “privacy,” with the Canadian manufacturer promising to maintain user privacy despite the Google Play Store access and app selection on Android (which tends to be driven by Google’s mobile ad push and focuses on selling user data to third parties in exchange for “free” OS access). BlackBerry wanted to do this, but even having the BlackBerry Priv on Android makes it a hard promise for the Canadian manufacturer. Perhaps if Rob Perin had stayed with BlackBerry, Oscobo would have been the ideal search engine for the company (alongside of BlackBerry’s own app selection, apart from Google).
Oscobo is an interesting name, but Perin and Cornell have a good reason behind the name. According to the pair, “‘Scobo’ in Latin means ‘to look into,’ ‘to probe’ or ‘to discover’. The letter ‘O’ in Swedish, means ‘not’ or ‘non’. So, Oscobo, to us, means ‘not to probe, not to track’.”
You can find out more about this privacy-focused search engine by visiting the Oscobo link here. Along with that, check out our Top VPN Picks to get yourself a VPN to match.
