Discovering what someone is searching for on the web can reveal a lot of information about them… Whether it be about their medical issues, financial situation, personal issues, or simply anything that comes to their mind, it will be searched, and in most cases, it will be documented by someone. There are companies out there that are making insane amounts of revenue from data collected from unsuspecting people. For example, Google has stated that they track things that you type into the search bar even if you don’t press “Enter.” Your searches are literally mined, tracked, and packaged up for advertisements to be displayed on web pages you visit. Just last year, Google made 95.38 billion dollars from ad revenue. While this can help bring you better search results when you need to find something useful, I believe that it can be dangerous to have that much information on someone and recommend using an alternative search solution that won’t trade your inquiries to the highest bidder. DuckDuckGo proxies Bing search results, Startpage proxies Google, and Brave is independent - meaning they index their own results from the web. I believe these are all you really need.
Brave Search is designed to be private by default, meaning it does not collect personal information about you, your device, or your searches. Unlike many other search engines, Brave Search operates on its own independent index, so it doesn’t rely on Big Tech providers and avoids invasive tracking techniques altogether. This ensures that your search queries remain confidential and are not used to build a profile about you. Brave Search is a strong choice if you want speed, relevance, and privacy without compromise.
DuckDuckGo pulls search requests from Bing while hiding your identity from Microsoft. They will not store any information that will identify you; however, they do store searches. I mainly use this search engine because it tends to retrieve results faster than the ones listed below, in my opinion. DuckDuckGo is transparent about its privacy practices and does not share your browsing history or personal information with third parties.
Startpage pulls Google results through a proxy to prevent them from identifying or tracking you. It’s based out of the Netherlands. They don’t record your IP address, your searches, and don’t serve tracking or identifying cookies.