In the present era of Technology, Google rules the world of online search, and there is no doubt about that. Google has dominated the search engines market, maintaining 86.02 percent of market share as of April 2020.
But have we ever thought of an alternative? I think most of us would say what to consider if you already have attained a comfort zone? But indeed, there are alternatives to Google we must give a try on. What’s more, to it these alternative search engines are the ones popular in their style. It’s just that they don’t appear fashionable when we compare them to the Gigantic Google.
It seems like some of these alternative search engines are classical antiquity residue since the inception of the internet. Others dominate certain regions, such as South Korea, China, or the Czech Republic.
What are we waiting for?
Fasten your seat belts! Because we are here with alternatives to Google and yet prominent search engines on the Earth.
1. DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo having a Global market share of 0.39 percent, is the seventh-largest search engine. It was established back in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg in California, and its revenue comes from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network and Affiliates. It doesn’t gather or store any of your personal information. This search engine is all about privacy. The search engine’s catchphrase is “Privacy, simplified” and is a popular search engine known for protecting users’ privacy, which means you can run your searches in peace without having to worry about the monster watching you through your computer screen. Yes, you can surf anonymously.
Moreover, it has a clean interface !! Something that Google is not very good at. You don’t have to worry about moving to other pages. Perhaps DuckDuckGo offers infinite scrolling in a very user-friendly manner.
They don’t track users, so they can’t know how many users in total are using their search engine. However, they made an estimate based on the number of searches they get per month, which are public. The best guess is 50Million users per month!
Hence, give it a shot here.
2. Startpage
StartPage serves up answers from Google, making it the perfect choice for those who prefer Google’s search results but aren’t keen on having their search history tracked and stored. It consists of features like URL generator, proxy services, and HTTPS support. The URL generator is extremely important because it eliminates the need to gather cookies. It has a distinguishing feature that is its privacy.
Founded in 1998 as metasearch engine Ixquick.com, it was later rebranded to Startpage.com. Startpage BV, a Dutch inc privately-held Startpage.com and has been profitable since 2004.
Back in 2006, they created “the world’s most private search engine,” which doesn’t log, track or share your data. Over the years, they added many additional privacy features, like “Anonymous View” for protection. Based in Europe, their privacy laws are amongst the most stringent in the world.
Hence, give it a shot here.
3. Gigablast
Gigablast is a non-big tech search engine in the United States. It was founded in the year 2000 by Matt Wells, who created this to index hundreds of billions of pages and that too with the slightest amount of possibility of hardware used.
It imparts high performance, massive scale, and real-time information recovery automation and assistance for its partner sites. The company deals with a wide range of characteristics that includes topic generation and the potential to index multiple document formats.
TThesesearch engine gives an opportunity to instantly offer minimum cost search with maximum scalability.
Hence, give it a shot here.
4. Ecosia
Are you the one who loves the environment, someone who just gets fascinated by strolling and looking at the beauty of nature? Have you ever thought that a search engine allows you to contribute towards planting trees and hence saving nature from distorting?
You just need to search the web for planting trees. Yeah, seems to be different but absolutely bewildering. Ecosia is one such privacy focussed search engine that allows you to do the same. Ecosia will use its surplus income to conservationist organizations that plant trees.Ecosia typically needs around 45 searches to plant one tree. They use their revenues generated from our searches in contributing to this noble cause. But have you ever thought from where did this idea strike? The founder, Christian, founded Ecosia.org the year 2009 to establish a social business after a trip around the world helped him understand deforestation problems. This has also brought fame to Ecosia, and they have won several awards for their clever idea and speedy growth.
You can just get the free browser extension to plant a tree. Ecosia generates its income from search ads and has planted more than 100 million trees. Not only that, they are the one who maintains transparency by publishing their monthly financial reports and tree planting reports. Doesn’t this sound amazing and interesting. And yet to add more to your surprises they claim to run their servers 100 percent on renewable energies.
Hence, give it a shot here.
5.Search Encrypt
Search Encrypt is a special search engine that uses local encryption to ensure that your search remains private. It is the amalgamation of encryption techniques, which include Secure Sockets layer encryption and AES-256 encryption.
It was started in the year 2016 and since then it is growing at a much faster pace. Search Encrypt is probably the most focused on encryption to keep your searches private. It is a metasearch engine, and you can easily use its search online or use it by installing the extension on your browser. As it’s a metasearch engine, the search usually gets its search results securely from somewhere else rather than using its own. Your personal information is never associated with your search, and hence it gets deleted forever once your search term gets lapses after the period of inactivity of 30 minutes.
So, the main features it caters are Expiring browser history, Transparency, and no tracking.
Hence, give it a shot here.
6. Qwant
Qwant is the most affectionate privacy dedicated search engines after DuckDuckGo. It ensures your privacy, neutrality, and digital freedom for anything you search o the internet. It is based out in France and is available in 26 interface languages.
Qwant is a very energetic browser that never tries to guess who you are and what you want to do here.It never tracks your searches or uses any sort of personal data for advertising purposes. It consists of trending topics and new stories available in the market. It drafts out all the web resources, social feeds, news, and images for any topics you search for.
Unlike Facebook lite, Qwant also has a feature called as Qwant lite which is a boon for someone who has a slow internet connection or is using older browsers and older computers. Qwant makes the entire web visible without discrimination and without bias. This is the most interesting feature of Qwant.
Hence, give it a shot here.
7. searX
searX is a free metasearch engine which was founded in the year January’2014 by Adam Taube. It utilizes other search engines and accumulates the results to your query in one place. It does not store your search data being an open-source metasearch engine at the same time. As your own metasearch engine hosted on your server you can review the source code, contribute or even customize it.
searX can fetch results from about 82 different engines. It includes major search engines and site-specific research like Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Bing, Wikipedia, and Bing. It is available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users.
A direct link is attached to each search result with the respective site, rather than a tracked redirect link used by Google. In addition, when available, these direct links are accompanied by “cached” and/or “proxies” links that allow viewing results pages without actually visiting the sites in question.
Hence, give it a shot here.
Conclusion
I strongly feel that after reading this article, you might have got an in depth knowledge of various browsers which provides you with the best search results without hindering your privacy. I would suggest looking at various other options available, but you should give all this a shot. Maybe you can contribute a bit to nature.
Feel free to comment for any suggestions or feedback.
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