When it comes to searching for something online, the first website we turn to is Google. This king of the search engines has become so major that plenty of people say “Google it” instead of “Look this up online.” However, it’s no secret that Google search results might not be pure and clear – the relevance of your new searches is based on your former search inquiries, on some information of your Google account, your IP address, and some other factors. In addition to that, endless contextual ads will chase you all over the place, which is definitely annoying. That’s why we decided to pick and review some available Google Search alternatives to proceed with the online search.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is an open-source search engine that doesn’t keep the IP addresses, logs, user activities, and cookies of users. Unlike Google, which tracks all your activities and shows you search results based on those, DuckDuckGo shows the searched data as it is. DuckDuckGo is supposed to be the search engine that perfectly protects your online privacy. This Google Search alternative offers some customization options like theme, appearance, safe searching, and even turning off the advertisements.
Dogpile
Dogpile is a search engine that collects search results from Google and Yahoo!. The integration of these two major ways to search the web helps the users find the most relevant pages according to their searches. Dogpile supports customization of some preferences, such as three levels of the search filter. Also, there is the possibility to track and show the last 15 searches made within Dogpile.
Ixquick
Ixquick is a Google Search alternative in which search results are based on multiple other search systems such as Yahoo! and Yandex. Ixquick also promises to be the most private search engine thanks to the fact that IP addresses, cookies, and logs are terminated within 48 hours after the search. In addition to that, it offers to open the search results through their proxy service.
StartPage
StartPage is a search engine that is created by the same company as Ixquick – even the interfaces look almost the same. The difference between Ixquick and StartPage is that the last one only uses Google search results during the search process. StartPage doesn’t track your old searches and does not use them for the new ones. Your IP address and cookies are also not tracked, which helps to get rid of context ads. Basically, StartPage is an anonymous way to use Google Search.
Qwant
Qwant is a French-based search engine that shows results from the web, from the news, and from social networks. Qwant is said to be using Bing as the major search engine, and it says that the search inquiries made by its means are not tracked. Qwant is basically a search engine that aggregates the results from various sources, and also features the possibility to create, share, and participate in boards – somewhat like personal bookmarks of the users.
Zapmeta
Zapmeta is a meta-search engine that shows results from the web, images, video, Wiki, and news. Unfortunately there is not much info available about the website, there’s only a FAQ section available. What we managed to find out is that this service uses Yahoo!, Bing, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Entireweb for the search. There are some preferences and settings that can be customized for better search results, for example countries, and searching with or without the words, which is really convenient.
Search engines we didn’t include:
Search.com – when we were doing the search, the major results that were shown were from the CBS Content Network. These results were taken from a couple of websites and that’s it. And only five results from the web are shown in a tiny column on the right side of this search engine.
Mysearch.com – we found plenty of information that this website might contain malicious content and be potentially harmful for your PC.
Whos Talkin – it took an eternity for the search to load and the results unfortunately were not shown.
Kartoo – whichever search inquiry we were inserting, there were zero results from this search engine.
There are plenty of alternatives to Google Search that don’t keep track of your search inquiries and your personal information while providing you with relevant search results. If you wish to stay anonymous you can find out how to maintain privacy on the Internet to make sure private things are being kept to yourself.