A week is a long time in IT journalism, I’ve come to realise, in fact five days is. Last Thursday I reported, along with most of our rivals, the launch of Browzar - a fabulous new internet browsing privacy tool thingy. The USP of this new product was that it would let users surf the web, bank online, log onto the corporate network and whatever else they might want to do on the internet, safe in the knowledge that although they may be using a shared PC, they would not be leaving a trail of information for some shady cyber criminal to mine. Now I know Firefox and Safari both have privacy settings, but to be honest most people use IE, and on a shared PC there is likely to be little in the way of choice, so hats off to Browzar, we said, kind of.

Now here’s the rub. Since then the blogosphere has been alive with the sound of discontent and accusations, on two fronts. Firstly, that Browzar does its best to persuade users to search via its own search page (the default homepage, which cannot be changed, is the Browzar search page) and then presents reams of paid-for-search results, which are not clearly marked as such. This means that the user often has to navigate to the second or even third page of results before organic searches can be viewed (and who can be bothered to do that?).

Secondly, some pasty-faced tech-heads have worked through the night with only a six pack of coke, a family sized bag of Monster Munch, a box of Kleenex and a well-thumbed copy of Nuts for company, to test Browzar’s claims. And it seems that the tool doesn’t entirely erase users' web histories. One blogger found evidence of his searches on the IE cache of his PC.

In Browzar’s defence, it is still in beta, so bugs will no doubt be ironed out in time – we all know that there is no amount of testing that can compare to throwing it out there and letting the public get its grubby little hands on the product and pick it apart. I know it’s a free tool and therefore needs paid-for-search just as Google et al do, but something needs to be done with the UI as it now stands….as I said, no one is going to be bothered to sift through even a page of Yahoo Overture-powered paid for results.

Perhaps they could give users the option to alter the default home page setting (possible), make paid-for-results more obvious(definitely), or even reduce the number of these (yeah right). The other point is that it is just a deterrent, you know? No doubt if a filthy crim wanted to get his or her hands on your web history they could with a certain amount of effort, but the thing, I suppose, is to make this harder. Perhaps the lesson here is to be careful about making such quixotic claims unless you’re sure the technology can live up to them. Or rather, beware the wrath of the blogosphere.