Google search alternatives
When it comes to privacy, using Google search is not a good idea. When you use their search engine, Google is recording your IP address, search terms, user agent, and often a unique identifier, which is stored in cookies.
Here are ten alternatives to Google search:
StartPage – StartPage gives you Google search results, but without the tracking (based in the Netherlands).
Searx – A privacy-friendly and versatile metasearch engine that’s also open source.
MetaGer – An open source metasearch engine with good features, based in Germany.
SwissCows – A zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland, hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.
Qwant – A private search engine based in France.
DuckDuckGo – A private search engine based in the US.
Mojeek – The only true search engine (rather than metasearch engine) that has its own crawler and index (based in the UK).
YaCy – A decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer search engine.
Givero – Based in Denmark, Givero offers more privacy than Google and combines search with charitable donations.
Ecosia – Ecosia is based in Germany and donates a part of revenues to planting trees.
Note: With the exception of Mojeek, all of the private search engines above are technically metasearch engines, since they source their results from other search engines, such as Bing and Google.