Google is the world’s largest search engine and the lifeline of Internet. It’s hard to beat Google’s search algorithms that can answer lots of your queries instantly. But privacy of user has been an issue with most of the large internet companies. And Google is no exception.
SEE ALSO: What is “Do Not Track”?
Google tracks your search history, your online behavior and a lot of your activities on internet. Google not only uses this information to fine-tune its ad serving algorithms but it may be pushed by the governments in disclosing users’ web tracks.
While searching, if hiding your tracks is an important concern for you, we suggest the following alternative search engines.
StartPage is one of the many search engines that actually do a Google search on your behalf. StartPage is not a real search engine because it does not crawl internet, index webpages and return results from its own databases. It simply takes your query, send it to Google, grab the results and show the results to you.
StartPage comes in between you and Google and effectively hides you from Google. All Google gets is the track of StartPage.
When it comes to privacy in search –DuckDuckGo is perhaps one of the most popular search engines in the world.
This search engine does not keep any search history, doesn’t set any cookies or HTTP headers and does not attempt to identify individuals or customize search results according to people.
Unlike StartPage, this search engine collates search results from many different search engines, including Google. The company has a special page that details how IXQuick does not comply to any of the government requests to share user data with authorities. The search engine also says that they do not have any back-doors in their system.
This is one of the oldest search engines on Internet. Although, by default, it tracks users but it provides an option called AskEraser. If you opt for AskEraser, the search engine stops all tracking activities.
You can use these search engines if you are worried about leaving breadcrumbs behind in your search trails. All big companies have to comply with the governments for the sake of keep functioning. But smaller search engines are perhaps left alone as authorizes do not lean over them too much. Enjoy private searching!