Google, Bing, Yahoo – all the major search engines track your search
history and build profiles on you, serving different results based on
your search history. Try one of these alternative search engines if
you’re tired of being tracked.
Google now encrypts your search traffic when you’re logged in, but
this only prevents third-parties from snooping on your search traffic –
it doesn’t prevent Google from tracking you.
DuckDuckGoDuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for the privacy-conscious. As its
privacy page says, DuckDuckGo doesn’t log any personally identifiable information.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t use cookies to identify you, and it discards user
agents and IP addresses from its server logs. DuckDuckGo doesn’t event
attempt to generate an anonymized identifier to tie searches together –
DuckDuckGo has no way of knowing whether two searches even came from the
same computer.
Its home page is simple and clean – even more so than Google’s.
Because DuckDuckGo knows nothing about you, it can’t serve different
results to different users. You’ll get the same results as everyone
else.
DuckDuckGo’s
donttrack.us page explains search engine tracking and DuckDuckGo’s approach in an entertaining way.
StartpageIf you prefer Google’s search results and just want more privacy, try
Ixquick’s Startpage. Startpage searches Google for you – when you
submit a search, Startpage submits the search to Google and returns the
results to you. All Google sees is a large amount of searches coming
from Startpage’s servers – they can’t tie any searches to you or track
your searches.
Startpage discards all personally identifiable information. Like
DuckDuckGo, Startpage doesn’t use cookies, it immediately discards IP
addresses, and it doesn’t keep a record of searches performed.
If you’ve heard of Scroogle – a Google scraper that no longer exists – Startpage is a similar service.
Startpage also includes a proxy feature — you can open a page in
Ixquick’s proxy directly from the search results. This is slower than
normal browsing, but websites won’t be able to see your IP address. The
proxy also disables JavaScript to protect your privacy.
IxquickIxquick is the main search engine from the company that runs
Startpage. Unlike Startpage, Ixquick pulls results from a variety of
sources instead of only Google – this can be a good or a bad thing,
depending on how much you like Google’s search results.
Ixquick and Startpage have essentially the same design. Ixquick
includes the same privacy features Startpage does, including the Ixquick
proxy links in the search results.
BlekkoBlekko doesn’t go as far as DuckDuckGo and Ixquick, but it’s still a
big improvement over Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Blekko does log personally
identifiable information, but deletes it within 48 hours. In contrast,
Google stores this information for 9 months – and then anonymizes it
without actually deleting it.
If you create an account and log in, you can disable the data
collection entirely by enabling the SuperPrivacy setting. Blekko even
lets you disable ads entirely if you’re logged in.
Ask.com – AskEraserAsk.com offers an optional AskEraser feature that you can enable from
its Settings page. When you enable this feature, Ask.com will set a
single cookie in your browser – indicating that AskEraser is enabled –
and delete all other Ask.com cookies. With AskEraser enabled, Ask.com
won’t store your search history except in rare circumstances.
Ask.com does clarify that your search history will be stored if a
critical error occurs (logging will resume until the problem is solved)
or if law enforcement asks Ask.com to log your search activity.
To surf anonymously everywhere — at the cost of slower browsing speed — try the
Tor Browser Bundle.
