Big Tech: alternatives to Google

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Techspot (h/t Instapundit) has a “Complete List of Alternatives to all Google products.” Here’s the principal search engine section

With growing concerns over online privacy and securing personal data, more people than ever are considering alternatives to Google products. After all, Google’s business model essentially revolves around data collection and advertisements, both of which infringe on your privacy. More data means better (targeted) ads and more revenue. The company pulled in over $116 billion in ad revenue last year alone – and that number continues to grow.

But the word is getting out. A growing number of people are seeking alternatives to Google products that respect their privacy and data. This guide aims to be the most exhaustive resource available for documenting alternatives to Google product. So let’s get started (in no particular order or preference)...

Google search alternatives

When it comes to privacy, using Google search is not a good idea. When you use their search engine, Google is recording your IP address, search terms, user agent, and often a unique identifier, which is stored in cookies.

Here are ten alternatives to Google search:

StartPage – StartPage gives you Google search results, but without the tracking (based in the Netherlands).

Searx – A privacy-friendly and versatile metasearch engine that’s also open source.

MetaGer – An open source metasearch engine with good features, based in Germany.

SwissCows – A zero-tracking private search engine based in Switzerland, hosted on secure Swiss infrastructure.

Qwant – A private search engine based in France.

DuckDuckGo – A private search engine based in the US.

Mojeek – The only true search engine (rather than metasearch engine) that has its own crawler and index (based in the UK).

YaCy – A decentralized, open source, peer-to-peer search engine.

Givero – Based in Denmark, Givero offers more privacy than Google and combines search with charitable donations.

Ecosia – Ecosia is based in Germany and donates a part of revenues to planting trees.

Note: With the exception of Mojeek, all of the private search engines above are technically metasearch engines, since they source their results from other search engines, such as Bing and Google.

Our household is trying out Mojeek; we’ve already started using StartPage and occasionally DuckDuckGo with good results. Techspot’s entire list of alternatives is here.

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