Search Engines with Privacy!

What you search reveals a lot about you — health worries, finances, whatever crosses your mind — and most of it gets logged by someone. Search is a data business: your queries get mined, profiled, and packaged for the ads that follow you around the web. Google alone pulled in roughly $265 billion in advertising revenue in 2024, and it collects aggressively to earn it — your keystrokes are sent for autocomplete as you type, before you ever press Enter. Better results are a fair trade for some of that, but I’d rather not hand one company that complete a picture of me. The good news is you have options: DuckDuckGo proxies Bing, Startpage proxies Google, and Brave runs its own independent index. Between them, that’s really all you need.

Search engines I use, in order

Brave Search — independent index, private by default

Brave Search doesn’t collect information about you, your device, or your queries, and it runs on its own independent index instead of leaning on Big Tech. That keeps your searches from being tied back to a profile. It’s fast and relevant, and it’s my first choice.

DuckDuckGo — the one that doesn’t track you

DuckDuckGo pulls results from Bing while keeping your identity out of it. It won’t store anything that identifies you, and it doesn’t share your history with third parties. I reach for it often because the results come back quickly.

Startpage — Google results without the tracking

Startpage proxies Google through its own servers so Google can’t identify or profile you. It’s based in the Netherlands and doesn’t record your IP or your searches, or set tracking cookies.

Privacy policies: Brave↗ · DuckDuckGo↗ · Startpage↗