As search engines increasingly gather and store data about their users, there is an opportunity for a new search engine that just provides good results, and nothing else. Which is easy to achieve when you are starting out – but if such a search engine ever does well, there will be pressure to start doing the very things they were against, for the $$$. Of course Wikipedia have stuck to their no-ad promise, so it’s possible for a search engine as well.

Stealth doesn’t record any info, and routes your search query through other servers so that the link you click on doesn’t pass on referrer data (browser, IP, search query, cookies etc).

In their F.A.Q there’s this:

Where does Stealth get its search results from?

We do a good bit of our own crawling and also utilize many different API’s (Google’s Ajax API, Bing’s search API, etc) as well.

From looking at their search results, I think it is fair to say the results are 100% lifted from Google. So for now, if you like Google results (just web, not universal) and care about privacy, use UseStealth.com

Maybe ranking services could use it, and maybe it could become the de facto standard for determining a site’s ranking in Google.