Introducing Privacy-Safe Search Suggestions!

I am pleased to announce that we have just introduced a much-requested feature in our latest version of SearchLock for Chrome (1.1.1): privacy-safe search suggestions!

Up to now, search suggestions have been disabled for SearchLock users. This was because search companies log each keystroke you make via their suggestion feature together with your computer’s IP address and can potentially tie this information to any accounts you may have with them.

While your privacy was safe, without search suggestions, searching the web no longer felt as easy.

As of today, everyone gets search suggestions back and can still be safe about their privacy!

How does it work?

We’ve updated the extension to conditionally connect through an anonymized rotating private proxy server whenever a search suggestion request is detected. Your user agent and IP addresses are changed between each keystroke before being sent to retrieve suggestions.

Since your search suggestions are retrieved through a proxy, you will not receive suggestions related to your location. To make location-specific searches (to find a plumber, for example), you will need to include the name of the location together with your search term (example: Seattle plumber).

Also, occasionally the proxy servers may act-up or be too slow. When this happens, suggestions will temporarily not work, but rest assured, your privacy is safe and it will start working again shortly.

If for some reason your browser is not able to automatically connect to the proxy, then search suggestions will be turned off automatically as well.

We’d love to hear your feedback, and please let us know if you have any questions. Happy searching!