Google: 5 alternative search engines (that protect privacy)

Google does not respect your privacy? From DuckDuckGo to Qwant, here are the 5 search engines to use in its place, with pros and cons.

For people who are more attentive to the issue of privacy protection, it is difficult to digest the amount of personal information that google site collects continuously. The most famous alternatives, such as Yahoo or Bing, Microsoft’s service, do not offer solutions to this problem.

But there are other search engines that do not collect and spread your data: we have selected 5, here are the best.

1. DuckDuckGo

Let’s start with DuckDuckGo, one of the most famous search engines among those whose objective is the protection of privacy.
This service does not collect or distribute personal information to third parties: after opening the search result, it prevents the site from obtaining the key with which it was found.
It is very fast and is concentrating on expanding the number of its functions, but the research is not yet at the level of accuracy achieved by Google.

2. Qwant

Even Qwant offers a similar service, does not rely on cookies and protects the anonymity not tracing the users who use it.

The idea of its founders is to offer something different than Google and this desire is also visible from the graphics: the results are shown divided into columns where also appear the entries of Wikipedia or social media.

Qwant offers a good accuracy thanks to the use of Bing to complete its research but it is still not widespread and has been advertised mostly in France and Germany.

3. StartPage

The same line of safeguarding user information is that maintained by StartPage.
Launched in 2009 as a brother project of the most famous Ixquick, it took its place in 2016 also, it seems, because of the simplest name to remember.

It takes the results from Google Search but without saving the users IP and without giving any information to the Google servers. This dependency makes this service a bit slow (for example more than DuckDuckGo) and does not show the omitted results on the search engine it draws from, but allowing the opening of the result through its proxy ensures a defense of privacy superior to all others. With this system the visited sites can not even know they have been opened.

4. Wolfram Alpha

Let’s move on to the alternatives that offer a good protection of privacy but have very different services compared to Big G: it is the turn of Wolfram Alpha, a knowledge engine able to perform non-research but to provide answers.
The flaw of this engine is that it can replace Google only in some moments, that is when we know exactly what to ask and we need a specific answer. It is the perfect service to choose if these factors are respected or when a real mathematical analysis is needed.
For example, by looking at Wolfram Alpha “eclipse moon” we are informed of when the next lunar eclipse will occur, whether it will be total or not, the times of the event, from where it will be possible to observe it and various technical information. You can also search for formulas like x-3 to get details like charts and more.

5. Brave

From search engines we pass to browsers with Brave. This software allows a secure web browsing, eliminating all advertising through its integrated adblock and replacing it with others that do not track users.
Rather than being an alternative to Google, Brave can be used together with Google to ensure better protection of personal data, or you can choose to use it with any other search engine (allows you to choose from 20 different options to be set as default).

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