Search Engines
Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex. What does these all have in common? They’re very invasive search engines that is selling your data to companies or governments. This is obviously not good for privacy, that’s why we will not use any of the above search engines. We all got our favorite one in the privacy community but I will present you with choices so you can pick one for yourself.
SearXNG
This is a very popular self-hosted metasearch engine. It is widely used in the privacy community. Now self-hosting is not the answer to everything, but to search it might actually be. If you have your own instance, you know exactly where the data goes. With that said you also have to set it up. It was launched in 2021.
DuckDuckGo
This is the most popular in the privacy community, its the go-to. DuckDuckGo is a fairly old compared to many other privacy options as it was launched in 2008. It is based in United States and uses the Bing index for its searches. This doesn’t make it a bad choice and these days its certainly better than scrolling 10 pages of ads on Google before getting a search result.
Brave Search
This is also a popular option that comes from Brave Software, Inc. Which is a company based in San Fransisco California. Brave search is one of the top picks in my opinion. It can search privately with the google index as well. It was launched in 2022.
Mojeek
This is also a good option that focuses on privacy. When people tell me they are looking for European search engines this and Ecosia is what I offer them. It has fairly good results even though it uses it own crawler based index. Which means that it doesn’t use other search engines results like DuckDuckGo does for example. It has been around since 2004 and is therefore well established. Its headquarters is in the UK.
Ecosia
This is based in Germany, which is one of the best countries for privacy. Not only do they have GDPR but Germany it-self is even stricter with peoples privacy. It is generally a very good search engine. The do make money from ads but if you have uBlock Origin installed then it doesn’t really matter.
