While Google is a great search engine, they do track your data and results to serve up better results for targeted ads and search engine results. If you don’t want your search engine collecting information and using it, you’ll have to use a different search engine than Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
Private search engines are also a great way to see that same results that everyone else would see. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Google and other services customize your search experience.
Tip: Deleting search history from Google
Head to Google’s history page, click Menu, advanced, all time, then delete. You can also stop them from tracking you by heading over to the activity controls page and toggling tracking off.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is perhaps the most popular private search provider. They don’t log any personally identifiable information, cookies, or IP addresses. Since DuckDuckGo also generates anonymized identifiers to tie searches together, it has no way of knowing if two searches are coming from the same computer. Simple, clean, minimalist, and easy to use, DuckDuckGo is a valuable choice for an alternative search engine. It even uses the same search queries that other traditional providers use giving you good search results.
Tip:
Use commands like !Amazon to funnel your search results through specific domains.
Startpage
Unlike DuckDuckGo, StartPage doesn’t pull from multiple search providers. Instead, they simply get results from Google, but without Google’s tracking.
The way it works is that Startpage sends the requests to Google themselves and returns them to you anonymously. They discard all personal information, and the service doesn’t use cookies, record searches, or log IP addresses.
Ixquick
Ixquick is run by the same company that runs Startpage. The main exception is that instead of just pulling searches from Google, they also aggregate searches from a variety of sources. Depending on what you want, this could be a good or bad thing.
Both Ixquick and Startpage have similar designs, as well as similar privacy policies.
Yippy
Yippy is a kid-friendly alternative that won’t show NSFW content. In addition, the site also protects user privacy by not collecting some forms personally identifiable information. Keep in mind, however, it does collect cookies and your IP address.
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