Inversearch: Building a Web where the Default is Privacy

It took Robert Scoble’s article An Inch Closer to the End of Privacy to get me to comment on the issue of privacy (Thanks, Robert!). You may notice in the comments that I said “If you want privacy, do an inverse search that way nobody is ‘out there.’”

An inverse search is a confidential, natural language query sent to pull relevant responses from sources best suited to deliver. You personally are not “hanging out;” you are querying, and then going about your day and actually having some semblance of a life. On the other end, the businesses and professionals that are going to respond to your queries are doing the same thing, inversely. Sources that elect to receive your queries are automatically notified of them; they don’t have to search, either. Businesses get your queries and decide for themselves if they want to respond and, if they do, you can rest assured your results are relevant, and not just starting places to query like Google, Bing and Yahoo! give you.