True, free private search on a large scale is impossible to offer at present. We have tried for years now to obtain another private search partnership since Google annulled ours, but it simply isnt possible. Its cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars (even with the donations from thousands of you) over the past few years to keep Epic going. The expense is so great at our scale we couldnt afford to launch our mobile browsers even though they’ve been ready and are fantastic. Epic protects hundreds of thousands of people around the world everyday. Our encrypted proxy/VPN is powered by hundreds of servers in eight different countries. To keep Epic an ongoing project, we had to become sustainable via our search options. Epic will now have two search options: free search by Yahoo & paid private search via EpicSearch.in.
When you use the default Yahoo-powered search in Epic, youll get better search results and support our mission including more frequent releases and hundreds more servers for our encrypted proxy/VPN. All searches sent to Yahoo are encrypted for your privacy and security. According to their requirements, Yahoo search does bypass both our proxy and adblock. Upon ad click in Yahoo search, the proxy and adblock remain disabled for several seconds. Their goal is to insure the integrity of their search ad marketplace. Due to their policies, a few other Yahoo sites including Techcrunch, Engadget, Autoblog, HuffPo and AOL bypass our adblock. No other sites bypass our adblock or proxy so Epic works almost entirely as it always has except in respect to the Yahoo sites.
We believe it is impossible at present to offer honest, free private search. Weve received many requests to support so-called private search engines such as Startpage, DuckDuckGo and others. To our knowledge there are no exceptions to Google/Bing mandates to share a users IP address and or location both to retrieve search ads and upon search ad click. It is misleading to claim to be private if youre sharing your users data with Google/Bing. Despite multiple requests, they refuse to explain to us how they work.
EpicSearch sends only your search query to a third-party to retrieve search results, never any IP or other personal information. It continues to be the only reasonably true, private, search engine in the world. To sustain it and keep it ad-free, we will soon charge a nominal $2.50 a month fee. All Epic users can use built-in Yahoo search for free.
Thank you for your support of Epic. Youve kept us going as well as helped change the entire tech industry focus. When Epic launched over five years ago, the vast majority of people in technology laughed at us saying nobody cares about privacy. Today, no one is laughing. Companies like Apple have launched massive hundred million dollar ad campaigns around privacy (more marketing than truth in the case of the iPhone — this changes with the upcoming Epic for iOS launch :-). Were thrilled to now be on a sustainable path to soon serve millions of users everyday. Privacy is serious and it matters. This is Epic!
