We reveal everything you need to know. Google attempts to track everything you do online, including which sites you visit, who you communicate with, and what products you may be interested in purchasing.
When you use Google services—and many affiliated services, some of which seemingly have nothing to do with Google—information about your interactions is compiled and stored in the form of a user profile. When you enter a search term, Google associates it with personal identifiers and it becomes part of your search history and online profile.
While this can be helpful in that it enables Google to deliver more appropriate search results, for many users, it feels like an invasion of privacy. Many organizations have recognized the need for search engines that provide reliable results without compromising privacy, and have come up with more discreet versions. In this post, we reveal the best private search engines and discuss in more detail why you might consider abandoning Google. However, these are not all on the same par as one another.
Our list of the best private search engines is based on the following criteria:. Some on this list blend both and utilize their own crawlers as well as pulling results from the likes of Google and Bing. DuckDuckGo is very popular with privacy enthusiasts and is the default search engine in the Tor browser. The US-based service has its own crawler called DuckDuckBot , but also pulls information from over other sources.
These include Bing, Oath previously Yahoo , and Wikipedia. We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings. DuckDuckGo displays ads for affiliate sites in the right sidebar, which is a little less aggressive than Google which presents ads at the top of search results. It earns additional profits from commissions from sites like Amazon and eBay, so you may want to be wary if those pop up a lot in search results:.
