Search engines are something you use every single day, but do you ever think about what they’re doing with all the data you give them? These private search engines won’t build an advertising profile based on your searches. These 4 search engines were reviewed by Privacy Guides, an independent non-profit unaffiliated with any of these search providers. We consider these search engines to be the best around when it comes to protecting your privacy while searching the web.
Brave Search
Brave Search serves results primarily from its own, independent index. It is optimized against Google Search and therefore may provide more contextually accurate results compared to other alternatives.
Brave Search includes unique features such as Discussions, which highlights conversation-focused results—such as forum posts. We recommend you disable Anonymous usage metrics as it is enabled by default. Disable it in settings.
Brave Search is based in the United States. Their privacy policy states they collect aggregated usage metrics, which includes the operating system and browser in use, however no personally identifiable information is collected. IP addresses are temporarily processed, but are not retained.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is one of the more mainstream private search engines. Notable DuckDuckGo search features include bangs and many instant answers. The search engine relies on a commercial Bing API to serve most results, but it does use numerous other sources for instant answers and other non-primary results.
DuckDuckGo is the default search engine for the Tor Browser and is one of the few available options on Apple’s Safari browser. It is based in the United States. Their privacy policy states they do log your searches for product improvement purposes, but not your IP address or any other personally identifying information.
DuckDuckGo offers two other versions of their search engine, both of which do not require JavaScript. These versions do lack features, however. These versions can also be used in conjunction with their Tor onion address by appending /lite or /html for the respective version.
Startpage
Startpage is a private search engine known for serving Google search results. One of Startpage’s unique features is the Anonymous View, which puts forth efforts to standardize user activity to make it more difficult to be uniquely identified.
The Anonymous View feature can be useful for hiding some network and browser properties. Unlike what the name suggests, you should not rely upon this feature for anonymity. If you are looking for anonymity, use the Tor Browser instead.
Startpage is based in the Netherlands. According to their privacy policy, they log details such as: operating system, type of browser, and language. They do not log your IP address, search queries, or other personally identifying information.
Startpage’s majority shareholder is System1 who is an adtech company. We don’t believe that to be an issue as they have a distinctly separate privacy policy. The Privacy Guides team reached out to Startpage back in 2020 to clear up any concerns with System1’s sizeable investment into the service. We were satisfied with the answers we received.
SearxNG
SearXNG is a proxy between you and the search engines it aggregates from. Your search queries will still be sent to the search engines that SearXNG gets its results from.
When self-hosting, it is important that you have other people using your instance so that the queries would blend in. You should be careful with where and how you are hosting SearXNG. If it’s public, people looking up illegal content on your instance could draw unwanted attention from authorities.
When you are using a SearXNG instance, be sure to go read their privacy policy. Since SearXNG instances may be modified by their owners, they do not necessarily reflect their privacy policy. Some instances run as a Tor hidden service, which may grant some privacy as long as your search queries does not contain PII.