We use the Internet to browse the website, consume content, and research to gather information. While doing all these things, we are being tracked by different websites. Not just websites, Google also tracks you and records what you are doing and searching. Even if you use Google Chrome, it does not give you the level of privacy you assume you get. Google Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines track your search history and build your profile to use this data for advertising purposes. But there are few alternate private search engines that truly respect your privacy. These search engines do not track your activities or queries. So, these are the safe way to search for things.
Some people use incognito mode to remain private but using incognito mode doesn’t actually makes your web browsing private. It only does not record your browsing history and downloads. If you open Google or Bing in incognito more, these search engines will still track you and your searches.
In this article, I am listing a few best search engines that respect your privacy and do not track your queries.
Private Search Engines That Respect Your Privacy
1. DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is one of the most popular search engines that never track your searches and offers a decent search experience. It is for those who need a private search experience. It is popular and serves over 10 million searches daily. It provides faster results with tailored ads. Don’t forget to try it once.
Also see: What song is this?
2. Mojeek
Mojeek is also a good search engine that lets you search the web without compromising your privacy. It indexes billions of pages from sources and provides you with unbiased search results. The search engine never records your search queries. It also doesn’t log your IP address, search history, or other information.
3. WolframAlpha
WolframAlpha is another nice search engine for private search experience. It does not track your queries. It provides dynamic calculations using in-built algorithms and delivers a different kind of experience when searching for people, calculations, health & medicines, money, and movies.
4. searX
searX is an open-source metasearch engine that respects people’s privacy. It submits user queries via Post to prevent query keywords from appearing in web server logs. The project was inspired by the Seeks project but doesn’t use Seeks’ peer-to-peer user-sourced results ranking.
Also see: List of Proxy servers
5. Swisscows
Swisscows is also another good search engine that respects your privacy. It has a strict no-data tracking policy and it also doesn’t record your search history. The search engine has its own indexing and provides you unbiased results for your searches. This search engine is safe and also family-friendly. The service doesn’t index any website that may be inappropriate for children.
6. Startpage
Startpage is also a known search engine. It offers browsing through a proxy server to protect your information from tracking. You can add it to your browser as a custom search engine to get a private search experience on the browser.
7. Qwant
Qwant is a France-based search engine that doesn’t record any user information and has no data to use for ads. It is a user-friend search engine that provides results for web, news, and social media. TH only problem with this search engine is limited availability.
8. Lukol
Lukol also uses a proxy server to deliver custom search results. It uses Google’s custom search to offer the results but conserves your privacy by removing traceable entities. It is one of the most notable private search engines. So, you should surely try this once. It also keeps you safe by safeguarding you from misleading or inappropriate sites.
9. Oscobo
Oscobo is also a good anonymous search engine that doesn’t keep or store user data. Neither it tracks you, nor does it lets any third-party services track you. It lets you search for information, videos, news, and images.
Are private search engines really private?
It depends on the business model of the search engine. Some search engines share limited data with third-parties to get revenue, while some search engine strictly do not share any data. So, you need to learn more about a search engine before blindly trusting it.
Wrap Up
This is not the end. There are many other private search engines including MetaGer, Disconnect Search, and Gibiru. If you want to have a private browsing experience without being tracked, you can try the search engines listed in this article. Also, do not forget to share your favorite private search engine. Let us know via comments.