image credit: https://www.naijaloaded.com.ng
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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