Private Search Engines

For every searches you perform using Google or Bing those companies store your IP and fill your computer with tracking cookies, to understand what you search, how much time you spend on the given websites and to track your surfing habits. All of that info will be conveniently packed and used for commercial purposes.

As of 2009, the big three search engines currently hold on to user data for three months (Yahoo), nine months (Google), and 18 months (Microsoft/Bing). Google has turned over user search data to the U.S. Government upon request. Google has also cooperated with the country of China in censoring their citizens. Google and Bing both get an F for privacy, while Yahoo! is a D-. All three track your online activity and save it in a profile with personal data including your IP address. You are being profiled!

Any online search engine that shares data with Facebook.com will automatically get an F for privacy. Facebook.com is notoriously guilty of tracking your online activity, storing data on you and profiling you, then selling your profile to 3rd parties for marketing and advertising purposes. To what degree Facebook.com is working with various world governments has yet to be determined. Facebook.com is often used by law enforcement in profiling a suspect, and in other ways by the U.S. government.

A private search engine is one that does not track you specifically. Everyone has a right to privacy and your search data should be logged of you don't want it to be.

The term "private search engine" is NOT the same as "secure search engine." A secure search engine uses https secure SSL while private refers to the search engine parent company not tracking you and saving information about your searches and online activity. Here we are more concerned about privacy. Encrypting your search only relates to privacy if your data transmissions are being intercepted, such as what is possible in a public WiFi hotspot. See our page on Secure Search Engines for further discussion of encrypting the search query itself, which does NOT shield you from being tracked.

On a final note, to help mitigate the degree to which you are tracking online you should avoid using Microsoft Internet Explorer as a web browser and look into security addons and extensions for your alternative web browser. Firefox users should look at our recommended Favorite Firefox Extensions. The NoScript and Ghostery extensions are highly recommended and available for Firefox and some other popular web browsers.

Ask.com

• URL: http://www.ask.com/
• Gets a C grade for privacy! - still does some tracking, but minimal retention, and a way to erase trackers.

In 2007, CNet Deemed Ask.com The Most Private Search Engine in the Land because that year Ask.com made a change to its policy on retaining information. Unlike Google and Bing, Ask.com does not record what users type into the search engine, nor does it use behavioral targeting. Ask.com was formerly known as Ask Jeeves (still available for the UK market).

Ask.com does do some tracking and data retention, so it is not 100% private. However, with the AskEraser feature enabled you can tell when your search activity will be 'erased' from Ask.com servers. You have to manually enable AskEraser.

DuckDuckGo

• URL: https://duckduckgo.com/
• Gets a ? grade for privacy! - more research required to score site.

The main issue with duckduckgo.com is that the search does not honor the use of special syntax, such as double-quoted search text. If you include a word or phrase in your search surrounded by quotations then no search result should appear which does not contain that specific word or phrase. Although duckduckgo.com does weight the quoted search text the search results will still include many "garbage and irrelevant" results. The developers of duckduckgo.com refuse to correct this poor program logic in their search engine software.

IxQuick

• IxQuick is the same as startpage.com --- The two websites were merged in 2016.

In January of 2009 IxQuick/Startpage stopped recording IP addresses completely and began offering secure searching via the https protocol. Using https makes it one of the Secure Search Engines as well as being a Private Search Engine.

Startpage

• URL: https://www.startpage.com/
• Gets a A- for privacy! - does not track, period, however, is a 'proxy' for other search sites.
• Gets an F for usability. Site frequently blocks legitimate users due to over aggressive anti bot system.

Just like IxQuick, Startpage doesn’t log your surfing habits and it doesn’t store your IP. It uses some cookies but does not assign you a unique-id cookie. The cookies collect data anonymously to help your search experience, according to the authors. Startpage acts a proxy to google giving you basically the same quality of search results.

Startpage uses Google results, but anonymously using proxy.

A well known publication announced in July 2009, IxQuick changed its name to the much-easier-to-remember Startpage. However, Startpage and IxQuick do NOT return the same results. Startpage returns Google search results while IxQuick provides search results from over ten best search engines.

Update 2023: startpage.com is NOT RECOMMENDED due to their over aggressive anti-bot site protection scheme. Users are reporting that they are being blocked from the site after using quotation marks in their search string, or if they are using advertisement blocking plugins on their browser.