1.Qwant:Started in 2013, Qwant is a search engine based in Paris.
Its search results are powered by Bing and supplemented by those collected from its own web crawler.
Honestly speaking, I felt Qwant was pretty good. My only gripe was with its localized results. A search for “chicken rice near me”—a popular dish in Singapore—yielded results from the U.S.
2 quant local results 1
In fairness, this issue isn’t unique to Qwant. Privacy-focused search engines don’t track your geolocation, so it’s difficult for them to provide good local results.
How private is it?
Qwant does not collect any data or use tracking cookies. It also dissociates your query and IP address for further anonymity.
Like StartPage, Qwant is based in the EU and therefore offers GDPR protection. France is, however, part of the Nine Eyes intelligence alliance.
FEATURE SPOTLIGHT
Qwant offers “search shortcuts” that allow you to search for results from a specific website.
For example, running a search like &a books finds results from Amazon’s books category.
See the entire list of search shortcuts here.
2.Duck Duck Go:Possibly the most popular private search engine, DuckDuckGo (DDG) has positioned itself as “anti-Google” since its launch in 2008.
DuckDuckGo sources its results from over 400 different places, including its own crawler (DuckDuckBot), crowdsourced sites (e.g., Wikipedia), and partners (e.g., Bing).
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I thought DuckDuckGo’s search results were good but not exceptional.
For instance, I was recently browsing Facebook and saw a video of a man bailing water away from a flooded street. I recognized the background of the video as Venice (Italy). Wanting to know what happened, I searched for “venice” in DuckDuckGo but didn’t see any relevant results. Yet a similar search in Google showed results about flooding in the city.
How private is it?
According to DuckDuckGo, it does not store personally identifiable information like IP addresses. It also doesn’t use tracking cookies. However, it does save searches, though claims to do it in a non-identifiable way.
That said, DDG is based in the U.S., which means it’s part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Privacy-oriented users may also point to the fact that the U.S. repeatedly conducts mass surveillance programs and collects data from various Internet companies (e.g., PRISM and MUSCULAR).
FEATURE SPOTLIGHT
DuckDuckGo’s “Bangs” feature takes you directly to search results on other sites. For example, typing “!w” and a keyword (e.g., !w singapore) takes you directly to Wikipedia’s page for Singapore
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