Horizontal search engines use crawler software to index the whole public web. YouTube, Amazon, and GIPHY are three examples of vertical search engines.įirst, we’ll look at horizontal search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. If you’re searching for something specific, such as a product or service in your area, vertical search engines are the way to go. You can do a horizontal search by entering any topic into the engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing and hopefully find a web page that satisfies your search intent. Horizontal search engines allow you to explore the entire web. Search engines fall into two categories – horizontal search engines and vertical search engines. We’ll discuss some of these alternatives here and why they’re worth checking out. But there are search engines other than Google you can use for different purposes and reasons – including privacy concerns. It handles about 5.6 billion searches a day, which makes up over 90% of all internet searches. A very good choice that is improving all the time.Google is the most popular search engine in the world. Qwant is a very impressive option that is a good choice for those that like the social media and news aspect of the search engine without worrying about tracking. In addition, you can search with categories such as web, news, and social media. Qwant offers a bit more to general users than other privacy search engines with its inclusion of news on the front page. Meaning that you don’t get served results based on what the search engine thinks you want to see, rather only the information it’s given. It promises no tracking and removes the possibility of getting stuck in a “filter bubble”. Qwant has been around since 2013 and is based in France. Making it perfect for the privacy-minded individual that doesn’t want to give up Google’s superior search engine features. Startpage doesn’t log any user data or share any information with third parties. Though an individual search engine to begin with, IXQuick simply links to Startpage now. Startpage is based in the Netherlands and initially started life as IXQuick back in 1998. You can even view images and videos through Startpage. This means you get Google-level quality when it comes to search results, without any of the baggage. Startpage uses Google search results but removes much of the privacy-intrusive aspects of the search engine. The reason they save searches is to help improve things like misspelling recognition. This is an issue because if what you search for does contain identifiable information, this is being stored by DuckDuckGo. They say they do it in a non-personally identifiable way and they don’t store IP addresses or user agent settings. It is worth noting that DuckDuckGo saves your searches, as mentioned in their privacy policy. Like Google, these are displayed at the top of your searches. DuckDuckGo makes money through advertisements and affiliate links. It collates search results from over 400 sources including the likes of Bing and Yahoo. It’s definitely not the most private alternative, but it isn’t as intrusive as Google.ĭuckDuckGo is based in the US and was started back in 2008. Google Search Engine Alternatives DuckDuckGoĭuckDuckGo is probably the most well-known Google alternative. When it comes to search engines, there are some great new alternatives.
Google offers very compelling services, but it’s a big ask to give up that much privacy. It’s become a huge problem for privacy conscious individuals. There are ways to mitigate it, but there is no real way to stop all of it. With every single one of Google’s services, you are being tracked. Gmail keeps track of your contacts, emails sent, emails received, and even the email content.
With the Google search engine, its what you search for. With every single one of these services that you use Google is tracking some statistic. Google Maps is another heavily used component that helped kill off things such as dedicated satellite navigation devices.
Google Chrome is the most used web browser on the planet, and Gmail is one of the most popular free email services. Many people don’t just use the Google search engine but are entrenched in their ecosystem elsewhere. Without any of the tracking and other intrusive techniques. Thankfully, there are some great privacy-focused search engines available that offer an experience similar to that of Google. With the vast amount of tracking taking place to help serve ads. Over the years, Google has come under increasing scrutiny of the way it treats its search engine users. Email, Cloud services, news, the list goes on. Google started life as a search engine but it has become so much more than that.