Private Search Engines

Welcome in yet another privacy guide, this time we are gonna talk about Search Engines and how they can pose a risk to our privacy and the method to mitigate those risks.

 

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Intro

In today's digital age, online search engines have become an essential tool for navigating the internet. However, traditional search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo collect and store vast amounts of data about our search habits, browsing history, and personal information. This raises concerns about privacy and data security. Private search engines aim to address these concerns by offering a secure and private search experience.

 

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Table of Contents:

• Private Search Engines

  • Intro

  • How and Why Tracking Happens

    • A Little Expansion

  • What are Private Search Engines

  • Alternative Search Engines

    • My Suggestions

  • Conclusion

 

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How and Why Tracking Happens

When we talk about search engines we have to think about them as a kind of our personal digital librarian. Their main job is to know all the books and the resources available and providing us the book that best fits our interests and needs. In the same way the search engine has first to index a large amout of resources that are publicly available on the internet and then it answer at our query with a bunch of links, where the first ones should me the best fit's for the user search.

Only by knowing this we can easily understand a couple of things: running a search engine that is always updated and provide good resources is very hard and expensive, a huge amout of data need to continously be processed and is arranged, also fitting user's needs can be complex.

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Now let's think about a scenario, we are on a travel to London, once there we check on our phone asking Google something like "films to watch today on TV", now this seems a preatty easy question right? but it actually might not be so simple. For a search engine that has data about basically every country in the world might be hard to chose what to provide you, should it give you a random film title? A blog talking about best tv series? but most importantly it need to know somehow your location to give you the best results, otherwise knowing which film is today on tv in NewYork would be preatty useless if you are in Europe?

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So here is basically where the tracking started back in the days, taking your IP address as context for the query so it can now know your approximate location an deliver links related to that region, same thing goes with the language, taking it from your OS default one so it will normally provide content that matches it. This type of data isn't inheritly dangerous for privacy, even if there are other ways to do it, as we can understand that is for our "best" and do not contain any sensitive information.

Progressing trought the years companies behind search engines have understood how knowing more information about everyone and everything can be really proficous for their pockets. This is where the real bad full-on tracking begins! Nowdays in fact search engines do not collect only our region and language but hundreds of different metadata, going from your device, the browser you are using, your real time location, your browsing history, your clicks on the links and elements on websites. They can even know how long and how often you are watching a content, the context, your routine.

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All this is always masked behind the idea that the more they know about you and the better they can give you targeted stuffs, pretty much the same thing is on the rise in the AI field right now. The real question is: do we really need to give out all that info? and is it really worth it?

The answer is easy: Not really! Most of those "services" do not offer us any advantage, vice versa we are getting bombarded with ads we do not want and to provide search results it is not need to share all that, often it can create the opposite effect, where the search engine keeps proposing the same range of context closing you in a tunneled vision, when you really should use the internet to expand your horizons.

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To make all this situation even worse is the fact that those big companies behind the mainstream search engines have been caught multiple times selling their user data to thousends of third parties. So not only it collects all this data about you, your searches, your personal preferences and routines and more abut it's all shared whith anyone who asks. As soon as someone pays, everyone is more than happy to share YOUR data.

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One final thing to keep in mind: Using the incognito mode won't stop Google from tracking you, in fact just this year Google has been forced to delete billions of browser's history recods as part of the settlement for a lawsuit where they were accused of improperly tracking user's habits. Numerous other fines also has been sent to the company for various of other privacy violations, if you are interested in the topic i suggest you to look around, there is a lot's of literature on the recent history online.

 

A Little Expansion

Now i want to share a couple of examples on how all this is actually performed in the technical part, without going to deep so everyone will be able to understand it. Let's talk about cookies, one of the many and most used ways to track users around, they are a little string of text that gets added at every web request you do, like an ID, so the recipient of the query knows what the user is doing, that's why on every website you visit everyone is trying to attach to you their cookie, so they also can know what you are doing aroud.

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We can use Google as an example, when you make your first search a cookie gets attached and from that moment every next query will contains it as well, not only that; but since Google offers also analytics services it has "eyes" on most of the websites on the internet, so when you visit one of them their analytic software can check your cookie and succesfully report that you have also visited ex. randomwebsite.com . There are other ways used to know your search history, like attaching multiple or longer URLs in the referrer header, doing multiple rediractions making your request pass from some analytic servers and more. I don't want to add more details for now, if you have the competence i encourage you to inspect the web requests and the traffic packets to see in first hand the traking taking place, it's quite fun!

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Another thing to mention is to not get too focused on the current terms and technology, cookies for example are currently undregoing a big change in the future of the web, as we have seen in the private browser's guide, there are now various technologies to block third and first party one. This means that new tracking and also defensive services will be developed, we need to stay flexile and not getting ipnotized by the false privacy changes some compay says it's doing (ex. with third party cookies that are now demonized, blocking them and allowing more first party ones is not a privacy turnover).

A lots of problems right? let's see which options we have as responsible users.

 

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What are Private Search Engines

Whith companies like Google, Bing and others collecting all this data and people not being happy about it, private search engines have been introduced by some developers or privacy-focused companies. These softwares goal is the same, giving the user what it is looking for, BUT without asking and selling private data that is not needed.

Because there are many different ones we can't describe a single way on how they works, we will see for the top ones later. What they all have in common is the idea of providing secure connections to the websites, not adding tracking code, never saving your search history, putting the user in control of their options.

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A thing to keep in mind before diving into the differents options is the current market overwiew and it's implications.

Search Engine Market Share Worldwide - June 2024 Google 91.05% bing 3.74% YANDEX 1.44% Yahoo! 1.26% Baidu 0.87% DuckDuckGo 0.6%

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Looking at the table we can notice that preatty much all the market is in Google's hands, that's why when talking about this topic its name always pops up. Dominating the market has indeed advanteges, others than echonomical, as we have seen the process of indexing and sorting every time all the results is complex and expensive, Google having done that for decades now and having a very large amount of money is able to have a huge index of websites that the others can unfortunatly only dream of. This means that when you are using a private search engine, which in this list only DuckDuckGo can be considered as one, you will most likey find commonly searched resources but for specific interests or queries they will not be able to provide the wanted results.

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The right approach, in my opinion, would be to use a good private search engines as the main one and whenever you have a more complex search or if you re unhappy with the result, consider using Google for that specific situation. When using the option 2 we can still protect our privacy applying all the other good practices showed in the other guides, like using a private browser, a VPN, anti-tracking extensions, the right settings on your devices and softwares.

BUT most importantly LOG-OUT from your Google/Microsoft or whatever account when doing searches, otherwise all the history will be saved anyway in your account, even if you apply all the other measures, making all the efforts almost useless.

 

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Alternative Search Engines

Now is time to discover the options we have, here i will list the most known ones and in the next paragraph i will provide my suggestions and an explaination of how they work.

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• DuckDuckGo

• Brave Search

• StartPage

• SearX

• Qwant

• MetaGer

• Disconnect Search

• Ecosia

• SwissCows

• Gibiru

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Here is the list of the 10 most known ones, remember that they all work differently so i suggest to analyze them and find out which one best fits your search need and aslo your preferences.

 

My Suggestions

This section is for who wants to instantly change search engine right now with the least friction possible and without having to read all the documentations and privacy policies.

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Option 1: DuckDuckGo
Duckduckgo, as we have seen in the previous table, is the most popular search engine in this category, it is owned by an US company which is also known for their own open source privacy browser. In my experience the search results are good enough for most of the researches, it aslo offers a feature called bangs which allows you to quickly change search engine for that specific query or the site (like Reddit), if it is necessary. DDG aims to provide you an "uncensored" and private search experience. It is the default search engine for the TOR Browser and take most of the results from Bing. Finally it also offer features like email aliases and a web browser, you can find more info about DDG on their website.

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Option 2: Brave Search
It is the default search engine of the Brave Browser, and differently from DuckDuckGo it has its own index of sites. They have integrated some interesting AI features, like a quick answer for every query by their private model called Leo, the interface is modern and easy to navigate. In my opinion this is the best option if you want quick structured AI answers on a topic or stuffs you can find on Reddit, for other searches i often need to switch back to another search engine as i did not find what i need. More information on the website

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Option 3: StartPage
Another easy to use and interesting option, this time from the EU, now with the HQ in the Netherlands. This option also offer a private search experience, it strips the IP and prevent ads from targeting you based on your previous searches which are never stored. This engine is basically a proxy for Google, it takes and shows the same results but without the fancy summarizes and quick answers, it's purpose is that acting as a proxy you are not directly searching with Google and your query is actually sent by StartPage. More information on the website

 

Option 4: SearX
With this option you have a slightly different approach to the problem, in fact SearX is a meta-search engine which aggrgates results from diffenrent sources (over 70). The tool is open source and you can chose the option to self host to be 100% in control of your search related data. Running the engine locally also allows for greater levels of possible customization, but requires more hands on work compared to the others "ready to go" alternatives.

Here is the link to the GitHub repository

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Whith this 4 options i conclude my quick suggesttion list, if you are interesed in the topic i suggest you to explore the other alternatives i provided in the list and find the one that best fits your needs. Some of the other options are in fact more niche and might come useful only for very specific searches.

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Remember that the search engine choice is a very simple and quick thing you can change,, so you can try out different ones just by changing the search engine in your browser settings or navigating to the search engine website like https://duckduckgo.com/, do some searches and understand if you like it or not.

 

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Conclusion

With this guide we have explored different alternatives to the commonly used Google or Bing which dominates the search and the data-selling market. Chosing to step away from those you can have a more concious, uncensored and private internet experience, whitout the risk of compromising your data and having targeted ads following you around.

Happy Surfing 🏄