Search Engines That Respect Your Privacy

Google has almost monopolized online search queries. And perhaps rightly so. They have done a great job in streamlining and speeding up the search process, organizing the world’s information, and finally delivering results that are highly relevant and useful as well as those that truly matter to users.

However, they are also taking a little bit of heat—or probably a lot—because of some privacy issues. If you are a bit wary, tired or simply just looking for other alternative search engines that are much better in handling your data, here are some websites to definitely look at.

DuckDuckGo

Okay, ignore the quirky name. And the quirky logo. Google sounded quirky at first, anyway. But DuckDuckGo is actually one of the best alternative search engines out there that are best for privacy-conscious individuals. In its privacy page, it claims that it doesn’t log any personally identifiable information, doesn’t use cookies, and discards IP addresses and user agents from its servers.

Heck, it doesn’t even know if two different searches come from the same computer as it doesn’t event attempt to tie searches together. Best of all, they don’t follow you around with ads. At least for now, that is. Privacy protection, clean and simple UI are what make it stand out from Google and dozens of other competitors. It’s probably your best choice right now. So go ahead and give it a try.

StartPage

What if you still want the best search results that Google delivers but just want Googlers to get off your back? Worry not. There is actually a search engine that caters to that need. Ixquick is another search engine that delivers search results from various sources, and hence different from Google. But they also are the brains behind StartPage.

StartPage is a website that shows Google’s exact page results but doing searches on Google on your behalf on one hand but discarding all your personal information, IP addresses from their own servers on the other. So Google cannot even trace StartPages searches back to you. Pretty clever, huh? And did we mention they also have a proxy feature that hides your IP and disables JavaScript to protect you even more?

Thus, Google may seek to monopolize search queries online. But if they do not heed to the needs of the market and adapt quickly, they might see a big chunk of their market share go to genius but also caring companies that protect users’ privacy. It’s only just a matter of time.

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