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Privacy-focused online search engine
A small set of privacy-focused general search engines—Swisscows, MetaGer, Mojeek, DuckDuckGo/Startpage and privacy metasearch tools like SearX—offer the strongest protections when used to look up adul...
Privacy experts point to a small stable of alternatives to DuckDuckGo — notably Startpage, Brave Search, MetaGer, Mojeek, Qwant and Searx — each chosen for different tradeoffs between independent inde...
Brave, Tor/Mullvad-derived browsers, and Firefox (including forks like LibreWolf) are the most-cited 2025 choices for strongest tracker and fingerprinting protection; tests such as EFF’s Cover Your Tr...
Brave consistently advertises and is described in reviews as having built‑in, default fingerprinting protections across desktop and mobile, while DuckDuckGo’s browser offers more limited or “some” fin...
Startpage acts as a privacy proxy for Google, returning Google-sourced results on behalf of users and emphasizing "unprofiled" search that strips identifying data , while DuckDuckGo primarily sources ...
DuckDuckGo positions itself as a mainstream private search and browser option that “doesn’t track you” and omits IP and other PII from its retention practices, while competitors take different technic...
The single best privacy-focused search engine depends on what "privacy" means for the user: absolute minimal data collection points to independent crawlers like Mojeek, while a blend of convenience an...
Startpage and DuckDuckGo both advertise “no personal search history” and “no IP tracking,” but the published reporting and comparisons show a consistent difference: Startpage emphasizes collecting not...
Using a private search engine like Brave Search or Startpage removes or limits search-provider logging and personalization, but does not by itself hide the network source of queries; adding a VPN mask...
Independent, formal audits and recurring privacy certifications exist unevenly across DuckDuckGo, Startpage and Brave. Startpage has historical third‑party certification from EuroPriSe but stopped rec...
Real-world fingerprinting testers (EFF’s Cover Your Tracks / Panopticlick, AmIUnique, BrowserLeaks and similar tools) are widely used to compare how “trackable” browsers look; reporting and reviews co...
Startpage’s privacy guarantees rest on technical design (no logging, anonymizing proxies, and an "Anonymous View" feature) and on legal protections from being headquartered in the Netherlands under EU...
DuckDuckGo, Startpage and Brave Search all use HTTPS to encrypt search queries; Startpage and Brave emphasize additional proxy or routing options (Startpage’s “Anonymous View” proxy, Brave’s Tor mode ...
Popular privacy browsers and search engines take different technical and policy approaches to reduce legal exposure for users: Tor Browser routes traffic through multiple encrypted volunteer nodes to ...
Startpage stands between users and Google: it strips identifying metadata from queries and forwards anonymized requests to Google, then returns results without building profiles . The 2019 majority in...
DuckDuckGo positions itself as a privacy-first engine that “doesn’t collect or store” personal search histories, IPs or user profiles, and advertises non‑personalized, keyword-based ads . Google colle...
DuckDuckGo’s browser and extensions offer lightweight tracker-blocking and report what they block, but have been criticized for allowing some Microsoft-related trackers and for limited extension suppo...
Startpage has a documented history of third‑party privacy certifications and has published technical notes about its proxy and “Anonymous View” features, but independent, modern technical audits that ...
Several privacy-focused search engines advertise use of encryption to protect queries in transit; a subset also claim additional client-side or “local” encryption so queries are encrypted before leavi...
No single browser or search engine is universally “strongest” on both legal protections and transparency; choices trade off default privacy, technical protections, and published transparency reports (...