While Google is no doubt the leader in internet search, there are other search engines who focus on protecting your privacy and not tracking your location or selling personal identifying information to advertisers.
We look at two of these search engines below.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged.
It has a very clean interface with minimal ads and infinite scrolling, so the user experience is nice and streamlined. There’s absolutely zero user tracking, and you can even add DuckDuckGo’s extension to your browser to keep your activity private.
DuckDuckGo includes a detailed and transparent privacy policy. However, if 100% privacy is your goal, you should know that it does save search histories. DuckDuckGo claims that this is “non-personal” and aggregated data, so your searches cannot be traced back directly to you.
Perform a Bang Search on DuckDuckGo
The search engine has a really useful feature called bangs, which allows you to search directly within another website from DuckDuckGo by typing a prefix. For example, typing “!ebay magic the gathering” would take you directly to eBay’s search results for the query “magic the gathering”..
A DuckDuckGo bang is a shortcut that quickly takes you to search results on other sites. You’ll be able to select from a large list of target sites and perform a search. The bang will then take you directly to the search results page on the website you just defined. Useful for when you know you want to search on another site.
For example, if you want to search on another site like Wikipedia, add a !w to the start of your search.
Check if Websites are Down on DuckDuckGo
Another one from DuckDuckGo here. You can quickly and easily check whether a website is down by searching: “is X down”:
StartPage
A bit like DuckDuckGo, StartPage was founded with strict user privacy at its core. It doesn’t track or store any of your data. It also doesn’t target ads based on your browsing behaviors.
Startpage claims to be “The world’s most private search engine”. You’ll be able to get similar results to those you’d see from a completely private Google search.
As well as being a search engine, Startpage offers a proxy service that allows you to browse websites anonymously for improved online safety. They even have a custom URL generator that means you can browse without the need to set cookies.
All of this is presented in a smart, clean interface that can be set to various themes, including Night Mode, providing a super-functional user interface.
StartPage’s privacy policy is simple and to the point: “We don’t track you. We don’t profile you. Period.” When using this private search engine, metadata (personal information like your IP address) is removed from your search query. This anonymous search request is then sent to Google, then the results are sent to you via StartPage without revealing any of your private data.