Who doesn’t trust their search engine? When we need to find something, we all turn to Google, Bing, or Yahoo. We shouldn’t be so trusting through. On Bing, cyber-crooks are now placing ads to ensnare people who want to switch to the Chrome Web-browser. Now, we find that some U.S. Internet Service Providers (ISP)s are sending your search queries to a third-party proxy company instead of your search engine of choice.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), several recent research studies have revealed that “some or all traffic to major search engines, including Bing, Yahoo! and (sometimes) Google, is being directed to mysterious third party proxies.”
Further research by the EFF and the ICSI Networking Group, a non-profit organization that researches Internet architecture and related networking issues, has revealed that your searches are sent to a company called Paxfire.