Poodle

Poo­dle is a per­son­al­iz­ing pri­va­cy-pro­tect­ing search add-on.

The most pop­u­lar search en­gines store in­for­ma­tion about your search queries and your pref­er­ences in order to per­son­al­ize query re­sults and ads.​ As per­son­al­iza­tion may be con­ve­nient and use­ful, the data need­ed for per­form­ing such a as­sis­tance may re­veal a lot of per­son­al in­for­ma­tion about you.​ In ad­di­tion to less harm­ful as­pects like in­vol­un­tar­i­ly sup­port­ing the mar­ket­ing busi­ness, re­veal­ing sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion may be­come a se­cu­ri­ty risk if such data falls into wrong hands.

Search en­gines like startpage.​com pro­tect your pri­va­cy by not stor­ing any queries, IP num­ber or oth­er­wise track­ing you.​ In fact, Poo­dle it­self uses statpage.​com in order to get a basic list of re­li­able and high qual­i­ty search results.​ However, the down­side of using a dis­creet search en­gine is that per­son­al­iza­tion be­comes tech­ni­cal­ly im­pos­si­ble.

Here is when Poo­dle comes into play! Poo­dle adds many ways to per­son­al­ize your search results.​ You can re-rank your re­sults by lik­ing or dis­lik­ing cer­tain search re­sults, cat­e­go­rize and fil­ter search re­sults, nar­row your search and more.​ Poodle uses dif­fer­ent ma­chine learn­ing al­go­rithms to clas­si­fy the search re­sults ac­cord­ing to your pref­er­ences in order to per­son­al­ize your search experience.​ Your per­son­al in­for­ma­tion is only stored lo­cal­ly in your brows­er and never leaves your computer.​ In order to pro­tect your pri­va­cy, your local in­for­ma­tion will never be up­load­ed to other computers.​ The only data that leaves your brows­er are the query terms which are sent to startpage.​com.​