Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed
If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
When Google first arrived on the scene, everyone marvelled at its speed and the almost supernatural relevance of its search results. Quite simply it blew anything else out of the water. It was a case of hasta la vista Alta Vista, so long Lycos and - very nearly - be seeing you Yahoo.
To this day, Google is undoubtedly the leader in many areas of search, particularly maps (no-one else does Streetview for example). No other engine can match Google for integrations with other services and it has the easily largest search index. However, the pace of innovation in Google's pure search business seems to be slowing.
But that's not the main problem. Google is primarily an advertising company; that's where its vast pots of money come from. It's search is designed to maximise profits, not optimise results. Moreover, countless times, Google has been found guilty of manipulating search results to favour its own products or those of advertisers while downgrading links to its competitors.
Then there's the privacy issue. Everyone knows how Google got so big so fast - it's by playing fast and loose with our personal data. Google search's best-known competitors, Bing, AOL and Yahoo (now based on Google and Bing), not to mention China's Baidu and Russia's Yandex, operate on a similar model but they are all playing catchup with the leader which enjoys near-monopoly powers.
The Googles of this world argue that they use your personal data and search history to provide tailored search results and ads more likely to interest you, which may be true, but such results are skewed by definition and lead to a filter bubble where less probable and perhaps more interesting returns are excluded by default. Plus, of course, you have no control over how that data is used, and an increasing number of people are concerned about the way information from web searches is being used to profile them.
So, what's the alternative? We've been spending a bit of time with some privacy-focused search engines to find out whether they can help us kick the Google habit.
Tabs: I image, V video, N news, M maps, Mu music, T translate, Tr travel, S shopping, So social, O other.
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Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed
If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
DuckDuckGo
Privacy search companies seem to revel in peculiar names, perhaps with a view that if you are going to take on a foe as mighty as Google you need to make sure you stand out. DuckDuckGo (DDG) is perhaps the best-known privacy-focused search engine, performing 50 million searches a day.
As a metasearch engine, DDG pulls search results from other sources, most notably Yahoo/Bing but there are around 400 others too.
If you click a search link on Yahoo or Bing directly those engines share your search terms with the target site together with information such as your IP address and browser configuration which can be used to identify you. DDG redirects the search so that the site cannot identify the searcher (although sites may still be able to identify you by your device's characteristics). In addition, the company stores no user information other than the search terms used. This means that suggested searches are possible, unlike with some privacy-oriented engines.
DDG earns revenue by serving keyword-based search ads (i.e. ads that are interest-based rather than targeted through profiling) and through affiliate relationships with Amazon and eBay.
‘Bangs' (search shortcuts starting with an exclamation mark; starting a query with !a searches Amazon.com, for example) are a longstanding DDG feature and there are now more than 13,000 of them. There are apps for Android, F-Droid and iOS which feature tracker blockers and force traffic encryption. DDG is the default search engine on Tor Browser. Source code is hosted on GitHub.
DDG seems to have improved over the last couple of years. It used to be US-centric unless manually configured otherwise whereas now it bases searches on IP-based location; image search is also better than before, although as a publisher we'd appreciate a usage rights filter. There's a video search and also news, maps (Apple/Bing) and ‘meanings' (i.e. dictionary definitions). If you're looking for a drop-in Google (or perhaps Bing) replacement DDG is a prime candidate.
Pros: Slick, fast, !bangs
Cons: Some questions over relationship with Yahoo/Verizon
Startpage
Dutch search engine Startpage begins with the premise that - bar the tracking and everything that goes with it - Google's search results are the best. So, the company pays Google to use its APIs but obfuscates users' details via a web proxy, removing all the trackers and logs. The company handles 6 million search requests per day.
Startpage's business model includes selling non-tracking, keyword-based ads, which appear at the top of the results list. Recently, the company became embroiled in controversy when an advertising company System1 bought what's reported to be a controlling share. Startpage insists its privacy terms for users won't change stating that System1 will bring value through its marketing expertise, especially in the hard-to-crack US market. But a perceived lack of transparency and the initial failure by the company to adequately explain the terms of the deal led to it being delisted from privacytools.io.
Startpage offers an image search with size, colour and type filters; video search (YouTube) and news - but no maps. Search results (but not for videos) can be viewed using the ‘Anonymous View' feature which prevents the target site from knowing the search term that brought you there, or from using cookies or fingerprinting to identify you, by routing encrypted searches through Startpage's servers. "They'll never know you were there," the company promises.
Startpage is one of the oldest privacy engines out there (originally it was called Ixquick) and in terms of innovation as well as results, one of the best. Because it uses Google, the results are similar to the search giant's, although not exactly the same because of the lack of personalisation. News is also slightly behind. Like many other engines, Startpage provides Instant Answers from Wikipedia and other sources, so you don't need to click away from the results page.
Given the importance of trust, allowing such a substantial investment from an advertising company would seem to be an unwise strategy, although the company points out that Qwant and DuckDuckGo are also VC-invested and the latter has a partnership with Yahoo/Verizon. We await future developments with interest.
Pros: Long-established private search engine, Google-like results, Anonymous View feature
Cons: No maps tab, question mark over investment by System1
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Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed
If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
Qwant
Qwant bucks the general fashion for minimalistic search gateways by featuring news and trends on its homepage. In this, it reminds us of the older-style search portals like Yahoo which seek to be a destination in their own right rather than simply a hopping-off point. It's also unusual in that users can create an account to save personal settings and bookmarks.
The company is VC-funded, with investors including the publisher Axel-Springer. It makes money from context- and location-based adverts through the Bing ad network although it says it has plans to develop its own ad serving systems. No personal information captured or transmitted to advertisers, Qwant claims. Like other search engines listed here, Qwant makes a play of not only privacy but also lessening the echo chamber effect that can result from being served content based on personal profiling.
"Our sorting algorithms are applied equally everywhere and for every user, without trying to put websites forward or to hide others based on commercial, political or moral interests," the Paris-based company says on its website. The flipside of the depersonalisation coin, of course, is that results may require more refining before you for what you're looking for.
Search results are a combination of the efforts of the company's own crawlers and those of Bing. As well as news, video and image search, the social tab trawls through results from Twitter, and there's music courtesy of iTunes. There's a shopping tab too but that wasn't working when we tried. The maps service is courtesy of the excellent OpenStreetMap. Qwant has an optional feature called Qoz which automatically donates money to good causes as you search. There's a junior version providing safe searching and information for children.
Apps are available for Android and Apple.
Pros: Colourful well-designed UI, music browser, can personalise by creating an account, good results and filtering options
Cons: None that spring to mind
Ecosia
As well as growing its user-base Berlin-headqartered Ecosia seeks to increase tree cover, with 80 per cent of its ad income going into planting projects around the globe. One tree is planted for every 45 searches too, and the search page features a ticker so you can track your contribution. The company says its operations are ‘more than carbon neutral', by planting trees and running on 100 per cent renewable energy. That said, search is based on Bing and Microsoft is far from carbon neutral, despite making a few nods in that direction.
Privacy-wise, the company states that it encrypts all searches, eschews third-party analytics tools, does not sell your data and honours browsers' ‘do not track' option. There is a checkbox under settings where you can opt out of ‘personalised search'. Personalised search sends an identifier to Bing, although it's automatically disabled if ‘do not track' is set in the browser.
The search is basically Bing plus contributions from its own crawler, with tabs including image, video and news via Microsoft although the maps service offers a choice of Google or Bing. There's a travel service in beta which promises to plant 25 trees for each booking made through it. Ecosia offers iOS and Android apps. Source code is hosted on GitHub.
Ecosia is a great Bing replacement provided you're happy with Microsoft's results (they are pretty much identical in our experience), and it's hard to argue with the company's mission. Privacy is not its prime USP yet it provides enough controls to minimise data leakage.
Pros: Transparency, mission
Cons: Needs tweaking to optimise privacy
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Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed
If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
Swisscows
The oddly-named Swisscows is a wholesome family-run search engine run from a datacentre that's buried under an Alp. It is family-friendly, private and anonymous. What's more, its workings are positioned away from the nine-eyes of the EU and US. "All the servers are located in Switzerland and neither the US nor other data snoopers can get their hands on this information," the company says.
As for the search itself, Swisscows uses Bing to obtain its results (presumably obfuscating the searcher's details like Startpage; the company has yet to respond to a request for more information). There's a music search based on Soundcloud and also a translation engine powered by Yandex.
Swisscows is mostly financed through tracking-free advertising using a technology similar to Google AdWords but with no user data passed to the advertiser. There's an Android App and the search recognises. 10 different languages.
Swisscows uses Bing for web search, although the German language version uses its own search index. It also has image search (Bing), music search (SoundCloud), and a German-English translator (Yandex), and there's also a new service called Digest which summarises documents so you can get the gist of what they're about without reading the whole thing.
On the results page what catches the eye is the Semantic Map, basically a tag cloud of related terms. However, we found this to be mostly a gimmick simply bringing a colourful GUI to the ‘related searches' function that many search engines have while using a fair bit of real estate. The default search brings back German versions of Wikipedia, whereas regional searchers can be selected pick from a dropdown as it doesn't seem to use IP address for this. You can also filter results according to recency.
A nice feature is being able to watch YouTube videos on Swisscows without redirecting to Google's privacy-sapping site, although this function is blocked at source for quite a few videos.
Pros: Quick, quirky, Swiss location builds trust, watch YouTube anonymously
Cons: Semantic Map is gimmicky, occasional ‘something went wrong' error messages
MetaGer
MetaGer is another metasearch site, this one run by the German non-profit free-speech organisation SUMA E.V. It interrogates 50 different search engines for results, as well as having crawlers of its own.
By default, it operates in German, but you can switch to English or Spanish for most features (not maps though). Ads are served on a non-tracking basis, using only the first two blocks of the IP address to give a general location. Joining SUMA eliminates the few ads you will otherwise see. MetaGer is available as a TOR onion site.
The search results feature an "Open Anonymously" option, allowing users to connect to the site via a proxy, similar to Startpage's Anonymous View feature. This is a nice touch for the privacy-minded. Mapping duties are taken care of by a version of OpenStreetMap. MetaGer has been running for 24 years and its source code is hosted on Gitlab.
Pros: Open source, longstanding - trusted, Open Anonymously feature
Cons: UI is a little clunky, no video search
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Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed
If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
Yippy
Yippy‘s core business is enterprise search, but it offers a free web search engine too. Originally released as Vivisimo Clusty before being spun out as Yippy, the company touts its use of IBM's Watson AI platform to cluster search results into meaningful categories.
The company insists it has no need to log user activity since its revenue comes from enterprise search appliances. There also are no ads or third-party tracking scripts. However, IP address and browser features are recorded for the duration of the session.
There are news, video and image channels, but few filters or sorting options upfront, meaning that Yippy is best suited for research-type queries where you need to be able to drill down into the detail, rather than more general search. There's a preview feature so you can see what the linked page is about before opening it. There are no apps for mobile.
Pros: Offers an alternative approach to finding what you need, preview, handy for researchers
Cons: No apps, dates shown are frequently time last crawled not published, no apps
Gibiru
Gibiru describes itself as un "uncensored anonymous proxy search
engine", publishing results that Google censors. Search results are grouped under ‘all results', which brings back the sort of links you'd expect, or uncensored which is generally a hodgepodge of conspiracy sites with just a marginal connection to the search term - unless you're looking for chemtrails or something similar. Uncensored image search is definitely NSFW.
The site feels pretty snappy but is occasionally plagued by 403 errors, even when the same search had worked just fine 5 minutes previously. The spaceman logo (entering the wormhole) and black and red colour scheme of the web search are a matter of taste.
Gibiru's developers make money through commission on ad referrals.
It does not track users or store their personal data, and searches are encrypted,
There are mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Pros: If the conspiracy rabbit-hole is your thing, this could be the place to start burrowing
Cons: Strange errors, UI, a bit limited - no video tab or anything other than web and images
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Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed
If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
SearX
SearX is an open-source metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 different services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. SearX can be used over Tor for online anonymity, and organisations are free to use the code or rebrand it for their own purposes. For example, Privacytools uses an instance of SearX for its own search engine. SearX queries are submitted via HTTP POST, to prevent keywords appearing in the linked sites' server logs.
Using advanced search, it's possible to locate all sorts of resources, from files to maps to torrents to scientific papers. The developers are working on new features including support for offline search engines that crawl local environments rather than the web. However, user experience, at least on the main site searx.me, is marred by frequent crashes, error messages, demands for CAPTCHAs (Google actively blocks some instances) and suggestions to try other SearX instances. Occasionally the whole site goes down, possibly because of a lack of bandwidth.
All of which means that SearX is not one for the casual user. Rather it is a project for other developers to tweak and host using their own resources.
Pros: Open source builds trust, can be adapted by whoever wants to use it, can be used over Tor, multiple search options
Cons: Primary site is error-prone
Petey Vid
YouTube keeps you hooked by delivering more of the same, in some cases winding up the dial to deliver more and more extreme content, because its algorithms have worked out that this sells more ads, never mind the consequences. Named after a ginger cat (what else?), Petey Vid is a privacy-focused and video search engine that seeks to level the playing field. It aggregates videos not only from YouTube and Vimeo but also from many other platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the Internet Archive, so you can search for videos posted all the way back 1996. Money comes from Amazon and Ebay affiliate advertising.
Users can filter on the length of the video and sort by length and recency, and there's a trending hashtag cloud to find the latest videos. Clicking the search button delivers up results with a small miaow, which is liable to have bemused cat owners looking around to see what their pet moggy is up to.
Search is multilingual and Petey Vid claims to have indexed 446 million videos. On the privacy front, the site claims not to use any trackers, nor to store the user's IP address or search terms. All searches are SSL encrypted.
Petey Vid is a really useful site that allows video searchers to escape the usual filter algorithms. To make it even more convenient we'd like to see some more options for refining results such as language and source.
Pros: Lots of videos on many platforms going back to the year dot, that miaow keeps the mice away
Cons: Could do with more filters for refining searches
Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed
If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
Mojeek
Mojeek is a UK-based search engine with the vaguely Google-mk1-esque motto ‘doing what's right', which, according to the company's blog, includes not tracking its users, serving unbiased results and running on the UK's greenest data centre, Custodian.
Mojeek grew out of a personal project by founder Marc Smith. It's funded by private investors but the company is considering opening up its APIs or taking advertising to bring in further income.
Unlike the metasearch engines listed here which aggregate the results of other engines, Mojeek runs its own crawler and search algorithms which were devised and maintained in house. Thus far, the Mojeek crawler has indexed around 2.5 billion pages.
The site is nice and clean with a single search box and web, image (from Pixabay and Bing, at least temporarily) and news tabs. Searches can be filtered by region - UK, France, Germany and the European Union. Searching is fast with results page split into general links plus news and Wikipedia where there's a match.
Boolean filtering using ‘+', or putting quotes around phrases doesn't seem to do much, although a search for ‘escape from -google' does eliminate the term ‘google'. For more obscure searches results can be a little sparse compared with the big guys, but the company recently took delivery some more servers to house a larger index so this should improve. There's a basic app for Android.
Overall Mojeek is worth a look, particularly for UK or Europe-centric searches or, because it ranks pages in a different way, if other search engines don't dig up what you're looking for.
Pros: Uses own search algorithm so can sometimes dig up fresh results
Cons: Small search index means results can be sparse
Infinity Search
New kid on the privacy block is Infinity Search. This is a metasearch engine that wears its sources on its sleeve, or more accurately on the right-hand bar of its results screen. Its code is open source.
Currently, Infinity Search combines results from the DuckDuckGo
Instant Answers and Bing APIs, and the company is in the process of integrating results from Mojeek with a custom ranking algorithm as well as developing its own search algorithm and crawler.
Infinity Search runs on the AWS Lambda serverless platform for scalability and has plans for new features including a news search engine (imminent), video and image search. Longer term, there are also plans for a decentralised search engine for use with peer-to-peer networks. Founder Andrew Wyatt says he created Infinity Search with customisability and respecting users' privacy in mind "especially since many of the main search engines do the exact opposite". There are Spanish and German language options, a browser extension for Firefox, but no mobile apps to speak of as yet.
As far as the business plan goes, it's about non-tracking ads, a planned ad-free Infinity Search Pro desktop application and selling affiliate links such as TradingView widgets for stock searches. The company deploys the user-anonymising Fathom Analytics to monitor site traffic.
It's early days, but Infinity Search has got off to a promising start. The interface is clean and quick and the sources bar includes results from Internet Archive, GitHub, Twitter and Wolfram Alpha as well as all the usual suspects, although unhelpfully clicking on a source sometimes brings back an empty list. It's basic for now but we look forward to seeing how this one develops. To infinity and beyond!
Pros: Quick, clean and open source, nice simple UI
Cons: Very new so a few rough edges and no apps, source buttons should be hidden if no results found
What have we missed?
There are lots of privacy-respecting search projects out there in various stages of development. Some are still very basic, some seem to have hit the pause button while a few have apparently gone under. Are there any we've missed? Let us know below.