BOSTON - Feb. 12, 2021 - "If you've ever wanted to find academic sources on the Internet before, be it a website, articles, journals, or something else; chances are that you've used a search engine. You've probably used one of the "big three" search engines, those being Google, Yahoo Search, or Microsoft's Bing," Lynn Bentley, President of Knobull announced.
A potential problem with these commercial websites, is that they record information about you and how you use them. This means that when you conduct searches in the future, you'll see more search results that have to do with things that you've searched for before, but not necessarily ones that are the most relevant to what you are searching for at the time.
Bentley continued, "The people behind Knobull didn't like the fact that other search engines were tracking the information of people who used them. We believed that using this information to sell targeted advertisements was privacy-invasive, pitched commercial clutter and skewed what results users get!"
Knobull is known as a "private" academic search engine because it doesn't record any personal Internet-related information about you, unless you explicitly give it to them. This means that it cuts through the clutter and doesn't care about your computer's Internet address, your web browser specifications, or even what you searched for, where, and when.
With nothing personal to go off of when you search, Knobull's search service Refseek will give you the same results for the same search terms every single time, no matter who you are. It also has features that block the websites that you find from knowing how you found them, so they can't use this information to profile you and show you privacy-invasive targeted advertising.
Knobull developmental features include:
Search for web pages, articles, journals, products, general academic information, and more results constructed by Refseek's crack tech staff and volunteer groups, and presented first for easy access to 5 billion academic documents.
Use settings to secure your web search. You can use the secure website that makes your activities difficult to track and interpret. Knobull can also redirect your search request so that other websites can't see your search terms and directs your search request so that your search terms aren't visible.
There are plenty of features for collaboration with fellow students, direct access to academic resource links, daily updated student news articles and free online tutoring.
Bentley concluded, "Online focus on academic topics and privacy clearly matters! We designed a Ladder to climb over learning roadblocks toward long term academic and career success! Privacy matters because, without it, the Internet becomes a dangerous and inefficient place for us to traverse."
