Are your patent search strings confidential?

Hello all,

I just wanted to pop in today to highlight a fascinating discussion that is going on in the Intellogist discussion forum. Our users are discussing the legal implications of using a third party vendor to
conduct patent searching. Specifically, they are discussing who might
be looking at your search strings from the other side of the search
engine.

Tags: Intellogist, confidentiality, issues, legal

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Comment by Mikk Putk on March 30, 2010 at 1:58pm: Thanks for posting this! It's a serious question. As you might know, there are several search tools that provide service, where you can insert whole paragraph of text and the result is a list of related patents. It would be interesting to hear Xyggy opinion, for example, how they have solved this confidentiality question.
On the other hand - how safe is the internet at all if we ask are your search strings confidential. We use credit card payments via internet, we have tens of passwords and pin-codes. Etc, etc.
Maybe some patent search engine provider can comment also how many search queries they receive per day?
Thousands? Millions? In addition every searcher uses different synonyms.
I agree, that there might be some risk. But, are there any examples of cases where such hacking has destroyed novelty or something?