The company behind Ecosia wants to counteract this. See how much CO2 is generated per second by Google. repeatedly conducts mass surveillance programs and collects data from various Internet companies (e.g., PRISM and MUSCULAR). Privacy-oriented users may also point to the fact that the U.S. That said, DDG is based in the U.S., which means it’s part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. However, it does save searches, though it claims to do it in a non-identifiable way. How private is it?Īccording to DuckDuckGo, it does not store personally identifiable information like IP addresses. Yet, a similar search in Google showed results about flooding in the city. Wanting to know what happened, I searched for “venice” in DuckDuckGo but didn’t see any relevant results. I recognized the background of the video as Venice (Italy). This might be an unpopular opinion, but I thought DuckDuckGo’s search results were good but not exceptional.įor instance, I was recently browsing Facebook and saw a video of a man bailing water away from a flooded street. Possibly the most popular private search engine, DuckDuckGo (DDG) has positioned itself as “anti-Google” since its launch in 2008.ĭuckDuckGo sources its results from over 400 different places, including its own crawler (DuckDuckBot), crowdsourced sites (e.g., Wikipedia), and partners (e.g., Bing). This shares mass surveillance data with eight countries, including those notorious for privacy violations like the US and UK. However, you should know that the Netherlands is a part of the Nine Eyes intelligence alliance. As a result, it complies with the GDPR-an EU regulation that protects users’ data. Privacy-oriented users may also take comfort in the fact that StartPage is based in the Netherlands, which is part of the European Union (EU). We send the anonymized search query to Google and return the search results to you. When you search, your query is automatically stripped of unnecessary metadata including your IP address and other identifying information. Here’s an excerpt from their privacy policy: But since it uses Google’s results, how do we know it doesn’t send information to Google? StartPage doesn’t record your IP address, and it doesn’t serve tracking cookies.
Why? StartPage exclusively uses results from Google, so it’s effectively Google without the tracking. Of all the search engines I tested, this is my top pick.