Search engine alternatives if you don't want to use google.

Shivashish Yadav
2 min readMar 31, 2020
Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Google Search engine’s ‘personalized experience’ comes at the cost of sharing our personal data and by allowing ourselves to get tracked by Google on the internet. At some point, this personalization becomes annoying when you see too much of tailored content and ads targeting you.

Besides, there are many search engines other than Google having so much to offer, not just in terms of privacy but useful features too. So if you are not impressed with Google search results or maybe you are looking for equally good search engines, here is a list of 12 best Google alternative websites you can check out.

♦️ DuckDuckGo
— US-based (EU servers for EU, though).
— Mostly Bing, Yahoo and own crawler results
— Issues: Proprietary, some components are free
Terms Of Services
Criticism here
why I don’t use DuckDuckGO

♦️ SearX
-> searx.space for other instances
— An instance of the open-source metasearch engine
— You can choose which search engine to use for the results.
— Issues: No privacy policy, some public instances use Cloudflare, ads or may log IP addresses/searches.

♦️ Qwant
— French-based
— Own crawlers and Bing results.
— Issues: “French law makes it mandatory to keep some connection data for one year”
Privacy Policy
Terms Of Service
— Criticism: Link1 & Link2

♦️ MetaGer
— Open-source metasearch engine
— Based in Germany
— Stores some information temporarily: https://metager.org/datenschutz

♦️ YaCy
— Distributed self-hosted search engine, built on P2P networks

♦️ Mojeek
— Uses its own crawlers

Others:

♦️ List of search engines: Wikipedia Link

♦️ Startpage
— Bought by an ad company
— uses Goolag search
https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group

♦️ Ecosia
— A bing frontend
— Criticism: Click Here

♦️Gigablast
— Fails SSL at Mozilla observatory
https://observatory.mozilla.org/analyze/www.gigablast.com

♦️ Yippy
— Uses Goolag ads

♦️ SwissCows

♦️ Disconnect
— Connects to Amazon

♦️ Wolfram Alpha
— Doesn’t even work without JavaScript

♦️ Lukol
— Shares data with Goolag
— Privacy policy: Click Here

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Shivashish Yadav
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Technical Writer, Software Engineer, Web Dev, Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Expert