What is the best alternative to Google search?

Question

42

Options
Considered

640

User
Recs.

May 7, 2021

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 35 OptionsWhy?

Best alternative to Google search	Price	Platforms	Category
92 searx	-	-	-
88 YaCy	-	-	-
86 DuckDuckGo	-	Web, Android, iOS	Search engine
-- Metager	-	-	-
59 StartPage	-	-	-

See Full List

34 Other Options Considered

DuckDuckGo

Top Pro

Very protective of user privacy

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share any personal information. Their privacy page has a great rundown on why privacy is important. The most important repercussion of this is that DDG doesn't use the data collected to tailor results, avoiding exposure to the "Filter Bubble". See More

Top Con

Owner would compromise his service/customer privacy

In a question to Weinberg, “if you were served an NSL or were commanded to compromise your service/customer privacy in any way, would you and could you just pull the plug like Lavabit did or would you run into opposition from shareholders/investors that would prevent you from doing so?” Gabriel Weinberg said: “No one is preventing me from doing that.” See More

DecentZhangGuolao's Experience

Privacy freindly. See More

Specs

Platforms:Web, Android, iOS

Category:Search engine

Top Pro

Ads are non-obstructive and don't track you

The ads are clearly labelled as ads and are non-obstructive. The ads are based on the searched keywords and there's no tracking involved on their visibility. You just need to remember that the site the ad links to might track you. See More

Top Con

Horrible search results

They store no information about you (theoretically a pro) but this results in absolutely awful search results, and having to modify your search terms 4-5 times to get what you are looking for. See More

DecentShulsaga's Experience

They care about your privacy and many other reasons See More

Top Pro

Has a wide spectrum of instant answers

For select queries DDG pops up a box that supplies the exact answer. For example, searching "stopwatch" will pop up a stopwatch, asking for "words like..." will show a list of related words, typing "password" will generate a password, etc. See More

Top Con

DuckDuckGo has no 3rd party certifications

A's Experience

As soon as Firefox allowed users to make DuckDuckGo their default search engine, I did it. In a time when everything seems to track what you do online, then share the info without permission, DDG is an oasis of privacy. While DuckDuckGo isn't a perfect search engine, I still prefer it's privacy policy to Google's. See More

Top Pro

Allows searching from specific sites using bangs

Bangs are commands that allow searching via a different website's local search engine, using keywords or abbreviations with an exclamation mark (!). For example searching "world war ii !wiki" will automatically redirect to Wikipedia.org and show results for the query "world war ii" there, instead of DuckDuckGo, using Wikipedia's search engine. The more common sites have shortened alternatives for these commands. Such as !g for Google, !i for images and !yt Youtube. The whole list of bangs can be found by typing "!bang" in DuckDuckGo. See More

Top Con

Referrers

A referrer is an HTTP header field that identifies the address of the webpage (i.e. the URI or IRI) that linked to the resource being requested. By checking the referrer, the new webpage can see where the request originated.” Basically it tells a website where you came from. DDG does give this out. See More

Peter J. Mello's Experience

DuckDuckGo is an amazing resource that gets far too little credit for producing such useful results without mining your data, proving wrong the contention by all other major search engines that it is the only viable business model available to them. See More

Top Pro

Infinite scroll of search results

DuckDuckGo results page is an infinite scrolling page, so you don't need to be clicking through pages. See More

Top Con

Based in US, so they cannot guarantee there is no backdoor

Ruth's Experience

I've always loved Google: Google has always been my go-to search engine. Recently though, I've become fed up with doing a search and being directed to page after page of blogs, which may have "some" content relating to what I'm searching but not good reliable information. So I've decided to give DuckDuckgo a chance, the privacy issues they claim to offer is also appealing. The first search I have done on DuckDuckgo was to find some information about Asian countries and it directed me to results (such as https://ivypanda.com/essays/similarities-of-asian-countries/) I hadn't seen with the Google search. See More

Top Pro

Has a .onion site

Only accessible from Tor. See More

Top Con

Shows too few images

When searching for images only, it shows too few of them and only a handful are related to the search terms. See More

Francisco's Experience

DuckDuckGo is a great alternative to Google. I love that it values user privacy and offers great functionality. Granted, sometimes Google gives out better results, but for the vast majority of queries, DDG is virtually as good as Google. See More

Top Pro

Many customization options for appearance

DDG allows customizing almost any aspect of the search engine's appearance including fonts, page width, alignment, header behavior, site icons, etc and has a selection of premade themes available as well. See More

Top Con

Still not better than Google

Results are quite often not as good. They just lack resources to do it, for now. See More

Parker's Experience

I've used DDG (DuckDuckGo) as my primary search engine for a few years now. It's increasingly rare for me to need Google instead, mostly just when I need to search within a specific time frame. While DDG isn't perfectly secure, and other users might miss certain features (like Google Translate and better non-English language functionality) more than I do, I'm happy not to feed the ravenous data-mining monster that Google has become as much as I used to. See More

Top Pro

Can disable advertisements

The search engine allows freely disabling ads. See More

Top Con

No date information in search results

In search results, there are no dates when the pages were published, which doesn't allow you to immediately know if the page is outdated. See More

cregox's Experience

privacy is the wrong battle to fight. period. it's the same as "liberty vs security" and privacy is (mostly) on the side of security. which we should learn to live with 0 (zero) security. yes, zero. imagine no possessions, remember? that's what lemon (dreadful phun intended) meant. that's how john lived. and died: zero security. and it is awesome to have the honor to die for this fight. still, duck is a great tool technically. it's even better than google, sometimes. and almost always, it's at least as good as. quite an achievement! yes, their goal also seem generally better. they do know marketing for privacy is just that: marketing. but i don't think they picked a fight yet. especially not the good one. for liberty! well, thinking about it now, even the USA, who picked it, lost track of it long time ago already... so, picking the right one isn't enough anyway. or perhaps the right one is something else, if it even exists! is there really such a thing as right and wrong? good and bad? reality was never meat to be perfect. it's meat to be fun. so, cheers! See More

Top Pro

Can function without JavaScript

Of course, it's nicer when enabled, but it's not required. Some browsers are too limited (mobile, terminal) or turn it off for security reasons (tor, etc.), and DDG still works. See More

Top Con

Bing = DuckDuckGo

It uses Bing for the query. See More

Yanis's Experience

The duck is starting to be famous... I'd use it but won't trust all the results. See More

Top Pro

Good for Linux users

DuckDuckGo has an API with some websites. With the help of this API, if you search for a fix of a problem in Linux, you can easily find an answer to the problem. For example, if you search for "How to update linux", you will get a message like this: How to install updates via command line Try this: sudo apt-get update # Fetches the list of available updates sudo apt-get upgrade # Strictly upgrades the current packages sudo apt-get dist-upgrade # Installs updates (new ones) --SirCharlo See More

Top Con

Bangs do not protect user privacy and can be misleading

Using these bangs will instantly connect you to the service you requested. For example typing “!g white cat with green eyes” and hitting return, drops you off on the Google website to display your results (thus logging your IP, search term and browser info immediately). It does not get you Google results inside DuckDuckGo. It is reasonable for DDG users to assume and expect a private search engine warns if there is a risk to that privacy being lost, like it does with Youtube videos but in the case of Bangs this does not happen. See More

rosalindmorris23's Experience

Privacy, nuff sad. See More

Top Pro

No filter bubble

DuckDuckGo does not filter your search’s with the data that they have. You get to see everything the Internet has to offer in a safe, private way. See More

Top Con

DuckDuckGo and Yahoo Partnership

https://web.archive.org/web/20161003060630/https://duck.co/help/company/yahoo-partnership https://duck.co/blog/blog/post/311/yahoo-partnership See More

GraciousBanaitja's Experience

they are pretty much just using bing results underneath See More

Top Pro

Has many fun features!

For example, if you search "Color Picker" , you see a color picker. See More

Top Con

Needs a clearer vision of the future

What's duck's goal or quest? See More

Aurelius's Experience

I tried to switch to DuckDuckGo. I gave it about 30 days, but I kept being extremely frustrated with the search results. Yes, Google stores information about you, but this is why their search results are so good! When I would try and search for a page that I know I had visited before, it would often take me 4 or 5 attempts with DDG, but when I entered my original search term in Google it would be in the top 3 results. The fact that DDG doesn't store any info about you means that it can never improve to match the way you search for things! Admirable idea, but the implementation needs a HUGE overhaul for it to be at all useful. See More

Top Pro

Lets you watch YouTube videos from the site

Duckduckgo lets you watch videos right from their site, so you can have more privacy than watching on youtube.com. See More

Top Con

DuckDuckGo has many 'Owners'

DuckDuckGo is owned by Gabriel Weinberg who is is the founder, current CEO and controlling shareholder. Investors/shareholders include Union Square Ventures and several others(https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/duck-duck-go-series-unknown--5d9c6644). DuckDuckGo generates it’s income from advertising (Bing Ads) and collects affiliate revenue (Amazon, eBay). See More

Top Pro

Sometimes results are better than Google

Sometimes the search results are better. Most of the times, they're at least as good as. See More

Top Con

Doesn't do personalized searches

Since they don't track you the results are not tailored to your interests. See More

Top Pro

Lets you go to other sites

You can go to the Wikipedia page for pigs by doing !w pig See More

Top Con

Hosted on Amazon servers (EC2)

Top Con

Search using language other than English is not so great

Korean would never use it. See More

Top Con

Form over function (overall search experience is poor)

It's nice to adjust the settings and all but after a couple of days you will want to go back to a more functional search engine. Sure DDG looks shiny and !bangs are great but many wouldn't consider it as a viable alternative. Better results for search queries is more important than fancy looking CSS. See More

Top Con

Search results are often unrelated and limited

Common conversions do not work, i.e. searching for 15F to C does not give you the conversion but just a bunch of conversion websites. Very frustrating. It's a simple thing but makes a huge difference to the browsing/searching experience. Also location based only works for the country you're in. Searching for, say, McDonalds only gives country results for McDonalds and no local results such as where a local restaurant may be. Not very helpful. See More

Top Con

Cloud saving still needs work

Cloud save and the ability to pull up your settings on any device is a nice idea but the implementation needs work. See More

See All

StartPage

Top Pro

Privacy focused

Unlike Google, Startpage does not record user IP addresses and strips away any uniquely identifying user information before sending the search request to Google. For each search result, Startpage also provides users with the option of viewing them via Ixquick's proxy services known as Ixquick Proxy. See More

Top Con

Owned by advertising company

CapableDziewona's Experience

It's actually slower than other search engine, taking up to a full second before loading. Moreover, it takes a gigantic amount of RAM which is massive. Sometimes up to 450 MB can be removed by closing my startpage tab. It's insane. See More

Top Pro

Offers a free proxy with every search results

The optional proxy allows you to visit linked sites anonymously too. While in the protection of the StartPage proxy, the third-party sites and its advertisers cannot "see" you. Plus, the site cannot download malware onto your computer. See More

Top Con

Uses only Google search results

LoyalUrania's Experience

I find this to be one of the most accurate and useful search engines; on top of that, it clears your search from memory if you close your browser session and reopen it. You could see this as an annoyance, but actually it shows a real commitment to privacy. See More

Top Pro

Filter by time like Google

AmbitiousHidimba's Experience

better results See More

Top Pro

Based in Netherlands (Europe)

StartPage is based in The Netherlands, where privacy is protected by law, so it is not subject to the same mandates and laws which is one (BIG) less thing to worry about. They own and operate their own servers in colocated facilities both in the U.S. and internationally. See More

BrilliantCethlenn's Experience

Strange post based queries don't allow you to copy past urls See More

Top Pro

Recommended for its no-logging privacy

Your IP address, search query, what site you came from and what site you click on in the results, none of this is logged. That is, by the search engine operators themselves. Even Edward Snowden recommended StartPage for its no-logging privacy. See More

StudiousEriu's Experience

slow response time See More

Top Pro

Independent & Private

StartPage is owned by Surfboard Holding B.V., a privately held, independent Dutch company, run by Robert Beens, whose only activities are operating StartPage, Ixquick and StartMail. No 3rd party investors or venture capital behind it as far as I could find. StartPage (and Ixquick) generates income solely from advertising (Google Ads). See More

Top Pro

Certification

StartPage has been audited by a 3rd party; EuroPriSe. They look at the use of cookies (all kinds), logging, web hosting and content delivery networks, use of social plugins and much more. This certification is renewed every two years. Having a trusted and respected 3rd party verify your claims is a big plus. https://www.european-privacy-seal.eu/EPS-en/Ixquick-startpage See More

Top Pro

Pulls results from two search engines

Startpage is a hybrid search engine combining results from Ixquick and Google. See More

Top Pro

Referrers

A referrer is an HTTP header field that identifies the address of the webpage (i.e. the URI or IRI) that linked to the resource being requested. By checking the referrer, the new webpage can see where the request originated.” Basically it tells a website where you came from. Startpage does not give this out. See More

See All

Groot

Top Pro

Is fully PWA enabled and can be installed on any device

Is fully PWA enabled and can be installed on any device e.g. Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS-X. See More

ReverentRaijin's Experience

Runs on any desktop or mobile device. Is very quick with results and is also capable of image searches. Fast and reliable results in a blink of an eye. See More

Specs

Platforms:Android,iOS,Windows,Linux,ChromeOS

Category:Web Search

Cross Platform:Yes

Multi Language Support:Yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

Clean and open interface without any clutter.

Runs fast and on any device. See More

Top Pro

Custom Wallpaper selection for both light and dark mode

Custom wallpaper selection. See More

Top Pro

Full Light and Dark Mode

Perfect for all conditions. See More

See All

Qwant

Top Pro

No user tracking

Top Con

They mainly use Bing results

It's a metasearch engine See More

Federico Montemaro's Experience

I love it! Hosted on a private infrastructure, it has own web crawler (for example Duckduckgo uses Bing), is based in European Union and so it has a strict privacy regulation. They are trying to make an ecosystem and so i use it See More

Top Pro

Has a lite version

Available here. See More

Top Con

Results non accurate as Google

They are not accurate as Google. See More

Ben's Experience

No tracking, No ad's, really nice user-interface … what do you want more??? Ah yes! Qwick Commands » https://help.qwant.com/help/qwant-search/searching/how-use-qwick/ See More

Top Pro

Hosted in the EU

It uses a strict data regulation law See More

Top Con

Not very good Android and iOS app

Top Pro

Good search results

Top Con

Filter by time restricted to max. one month

In difference to past year of some other search engines. See More

Top Pro

Ecosystem Qwant Maps, Music, Boards...

They are building an ecosystem See More

Top Pro

Instant answers

They have like "shortcodes" named instant answers that let you have an answer from the Qwant interface (for example the hash of a word) See More

Top Pro

Qwick commands (jump to any other search/website)

Use "&g" to jump to google; &a for amazon; &tw for twitter; &ec for ecosia; … More » https://help.qwant.com/help/qwant-search/searching/how-use-qwick/ See More

Top Pro

Private infrastructure and hosting

They own theirs servers See More

Top Pro

Ad free/Merchant independent

So far, Qwant does not sort searches based on Merchant. See More

Top Pro

No filter bubble

See All

Yandex

Top Pro

Very lightweight and fast

Top Con

russian google

SociableHunabKu's Experience

Better performance than Google. See More

Top Pro

Good search

Sometimes more results than Google and DDG. See More

Top Con

russian google

MerrySuaixtix's Experience

Very pleasant and clear; good search with sometimes more results than Google and DDG See More

Top Pro

Minimalistic and beautiful

Yandex seems to get their inspiration from Chrome and Safari making this an undoubtedly beautiful browser with its unique and good looks. See More

Олег Медведев's Experience

Best See More

Top Pro

Quick and reliable

Top Pro

No repeated ads

Ads of services and productions you search online keep reappearing on google searches. See More

See All

Ecosia

Add Video or Image

Bing

Top Con

USA Based

USA based = no privacy. Don't trade ease of use over privacy! See More

Top Pro

Incentivizes use by offering rewards

First 15 searches of the day earn 1 credit each. Credits can be exchanged for various things such as gift cards, discounts, or memberships. See More

IngeniousGangrimDoryeong's Experience

I recommend Bing because of its rewards features. See More

Top Con

No advanced search page

Top Pro

Advanced image search

KindheartedElkunirsa's Experience

0 Privacy, USA based, forget about it. See More

Top Con

Very very slow

Bing has very slow load times compared to other engines. See More

CalmIxpiyacoc's Experience

Very nice, little ads and great background pictures See More

Top Con

Can look for animated gifs

See All

dropicon

ResourcefulBodbDerg's Experience

I like the filters on the result pages See More

Specs

Platforms:Desktop, Mobile

Category:Search

All-in-one Internet Search

Add Video or Image

Presearch.org

Top Pro

Rewards

Allows users to earn tokens for searches conducted on the platform. See More

Top Con

Requires to login to use it

You can't even read the "About" section without creating an account. See More

Irvine Madula's Experience

Its a decentralized ( Block-chain based) search engine, you get paid to search, and most/all search engines are put in one place, instead of getting results from one specific engine, by going for Presearch, from one search i get results from all engines, so, i vote Presearch. See More

Top Pro

Community driven

The algorithms are provided by the community allowing for transparency and no manual manipulation. See More

Top Con

Portal vs. Engine

It's currently a search portal; the engine is scheduled for release sometime later this year. See More

GutsyGeras's Experience

A search engine built with interest in people's privacy. What's more, you get paid for using it. Presearch is the best thing to happen to the Internet. See More

Top Pro

Customization

Users can choose which engines they use most (i.e. Github for developers or image searches for artists). See More

shineon's Experience

An awesome new approach to search! I like all the options, the direct access, and the gamefication. See More

Top Pro

Easy working and customer friendly

MellowYacatecuhtli's Experience

Amazing See More

See All

ChaCha

Top Con

Account required to post a new question online

You need to register for a ChaCha account in order to post a question that hasn't previously been asked. See More

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score 58 · Accepted Answer

searx

Top Pro

Privacy focused

Top Con

Gives censored results

What's the point of using a SE that still gives you censored results from Google and other major search engines. Look up the word "alternative." It doesn't mean relying on a search engine yo9u are trying to get away from, i.e. Google. See More

LivelyUsumgallu's Experience

Gives censored results from Google, Bing, etc. See More

Top Pro

Very customizable

Choose which search results to use (Google, Bing, Mojeek, etc.) See More

Top Con

Interface not similar to Google search

ResponsiveAlkonost's Experience

Great alternative to Google See More

Top Pro

Self hosted

Host your own local instance and be in total control of your data See More

Top Pro

Free software

It is open source See More

Top Pro

Multiple public instances

So you can choose which one you want to use See More

Top Pro

Very fast

Since it is a Python program with a web interface, it's very very fast even on a poor internet connection See More

Top Pro

Can add many search engines

Have a vast choice for choosing search engines See More

Top Pro

Supports instant answers

Uses Google and Bing, and hence has the 'quick answers' feature of both the search engines. See More

Top Pro

Can use a proxy

Using a proxy called Morty hides the IP address of the user See More

Top Pro

Most Private Search engine

Since it can be hosted on your own server/ computer, it is very private, nothing leaves your computer. No cookies or ads too See More

Top Pro

Extremely customisable

Since you have access to all the .yaml files, you can easily modify it to your needs. See More

See All

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Stop wasting time searching endlessly. Lustre recommends the best products at their lowest prices – right on Amazon.

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The Best 1 of 35 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for searx

My Recommendation for searx

Privacy focused

Gives censored results

Very customizable

Interface not similar to Google search

Self hosted

Free software

Multiple public instances

Very fast

Can add many search engines

Supports instant answers

Can use a proxy

Most Private Search engine

Extremely customisable

34 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for YaCy

My Recommendation for YaCy

Free / libre software

Difficult to censor

My Recommendation for DuckDuckGo

My Recommendation for DuckDuckGo

Very protective of user privacy

Owner would compromise his service/customer privacy

Ads are non-obstructive and don't track you

Horrible search results

Has a wide spectrum of instant answers

DuckDuckGo has no 3rd party certifications

Allows searching from specific sites using bangs

Referrers

Infinite scroll of search results

Based in US, so they cannot guarantee there is no backdoor

Has a .onion site

Shows too few images

Many customization options for appearance

Still not better than Google

Can disable advertisements

No date information in search results

Can function without JavaScript

Bing = DuckDuckGo

Good for Linux users

Bangs do not protect user privacy and can be misleading

No filter bubble

DuckDuckGo and Yahoo Partnership

Has many fun features!

Needs a clearer vision of the future

Lets you watch YouTube videos from the site

DuckDuckGo has many 'Owners'

Sometimes results are better than Google

Doesn't do personalized searches

Lets you go to other sites

Hosted on Amazon servers (EC2)

Search using language other than English is not so great

Form over function (overall search experience is poor)

Search results are often unrelated and limited

Cloud saving still needs work

My Recommendation for Metager

My Recommendation for Metager

Run by a non profit organisation dedicated to privacy and data protection

Logs IP addresses and sends them to their advertising partners

Allows to visit search results anonymously

Uses only Bing and Scopia results

Supports easy search in open-street-map

Logs IP addresses and sends them to their advertising partners

Tor network service

Open Source

My Recommendation for StartPage

My Recommendation for StartPage

Privacy focused

Owned by advertising company

Offers a free proxy with every search results

Uses only Google search results

Filter by time like Google

Based in Netherlands (Europe)

Recommended for its no-logging privacy

Independent & Private

Certification

Pulls results from two search engines

Referrers