Google can no longer be considered a trust-worthy search engine.
It frequently modifies and manipulates search according to their political persuasion, or
in pursuit of eliminating competition and promoting their own services above others.
Marketers are gaming for search results and that leads Google to prioritize targeted advertising
over relevant search results.
Google’s business model stands on conflict of interest.
If you look for objective coverage of world events, or look for best products you want
to buy, Google is too influenced by its advertising model to offer you to see the Internet as
it is and not as Google wants you to see.
Thus it is essential to turn to Google Search alternatives that respect users and their
business model doesn’t conflict with the interests of Internet citizens.
If you are not convinced to ditch Google you can check out my previous video where I criticize
Google’s monopoly abuse and search manipulation in more detail.
If you are already convinced to switch to Google Search alternatives, here I provide
a list of best search engines that expose you to the Internet content based on merit
and not how much someone paid them for higher rankings, do not violate your digital rights,
and don’t destroy every small business in the process.
It is also advised that you don’t rely solely on a single search engine alternative, but
diversify your perspective by trying out different search engine algorithms.
This video reviews following search engine alternatives as a list and not ranking so
it’s up to you to decide which one will become your default search engine and which
ones will be secondary.
Privacy is an important aspect of all of these Google search alternatives as their main goal
is to neutrally show all of the Web.
This perfectly allows plenty of room for interest based advertising – if you look for a specific
product review, it’s completely reasonable for marketers to display their ads in attempt
to get your attention.
Anything beyond that is psychological profiling maintained to manipulate your choices.
You as a consumer have a right to be exposed to the products without deception.
Therefore advertisers shouldn’t be allowed to view what you do outside of their services
and personalize their marketing accordingly.
You want to see the best content and product at the best price possible.
You should be allowed to view relevant results based on how your search query matches with
the merit of the web content.
Not to be tricked into a customized advertisement-filled filter bubble that Google creates.
Qwant.com The first such search engine on my list is
qwant.com.
It’s a France-based search engine that combines aggregation of Microsoft Bing search results
with its own results dragged in by Qwant’s Web crawlers.
Qwant search engine doesn’t plant any third-party cookies on your device, doesn’t store any
trackers, has no targeted advertising and doesn’t blend merited content with promotional.
Its user interface is fairly unique when compared to Google or Bing.
But its color scheme does resemble the all mighty Google, which is a nice feature for
smooth transitioning.
The search results are displayed in a panoramic order, meaning there are no result pages and
everything gets ranked as equally as possible.
By default it will categorize your search by web content, news, social, images and videos.
Which is much more objective than Google’s “Universal Search”, because Universal
Search is basically just an excuse for Google to place their own content before anything
else.
When searching for videos on Qwant, you can choose a service – by default it’s gonna
be Youtube, but Dailymotion and Vimeo are also there.
However, any website can host their videos and there certainly are many more video sharing
websites than just these three.
Many of them are just being built as alternatives.
It would be great to open up a video search to push the Web forward the same way.
You can filter your image search by size, license, and source (which only lists all
of the web, flickr, and 500px).
But when filtering the image search results by size, it doesn’t actually rank them by
size.
Which I would suggest as something to fix.
Qwant is a newer search engine and gains a lot of support in France.
But it’s currently translated only into 27 languages so this might not be so open
to all pits of the global user base yet.
Qwant also allows you to log in to save your search modification and use features like
saving links to bookmarks or boards.
Qwant is certainly a great alternative especially if you are francophone.
Nonetheless, I would definitely recommend adding Qwant.com to your list to diversify
your exposure and burst the filter bubble.
Qwant can be used with its main version, but there is also a light version called QwantLite,
QwantJunior for kids and Qwant mobile app.
Searx.me Next search engine is searx.me.
This one is not really a search engine in classic terms.
It rather acts as a result aggregate of other search engines so it won’t provide you anything
of its own.
The advantage of searx.me is that this metasearch engine will make your search as anonymous
as possible.
Searx.me doesn’t collect or store absolutely anything about you.
The results are completely raw, exposing you to the open Web in its entirety with zero
personalization.
The code of searx.me is completely open source and allows decentralization of its platform.
It’s also possible to search with searx through tor using onion link for extra layer
of anonymity.
Some of the main features include categorization of images by size and date, or filter your
search to videos, web, news, social, map and others.
The user interface is extremely simplistic and the site doesn’t flood you with any
of its own content.
Literally all you get with searx are aggregated search results and nothing else.
This is something what Google aimed to be before it sold its soul to devil.
The hardcore privacy level of this alternative search engine lets you view everything relevant
to the search query, which doesn’t always brings the smartest results you are looking
for.
If you want as much privacy as possible with a search engine, searx.me will get you further
than any other alternative.
Startpage.com Third search engine on my list is StartPage.
Google has the luxury to invest billions to improve their search engine.
You might be really tempted by such an amount of computing power generating results for
you, but the drawback is advertisement-based personalization and filter bubble.
Startpage solves this problem for you by indexing Google results that are proxied on the site
so that your identity is never revealed to Google.
This search engines mimics Google in appearance so that it doesn’t stand in your way.
Many people consider Google results to be the most relevant for them.
While I find this to be a very subjective term, it’s completely reasonable to prefer
some results over others.
Startpage will give you almost all of the Google Search features and it also display
the results the same way as Google.
Bear in mind that while Startpage can stop the data flow from your device to Google,
it can’t stop other Google’s practices that manipulate search – like filtering
suggestions Google thinks are impolite, showing links that paid the most, and prioritizing
its own content.
Google also has its own initiative to combat extremism and “fake news”, which frees
the company to censor web content as they find politically appropriate.
Using Startpage you can filter your search queries by category and even utilize advanced
syntax to search for a group of words, exact phrases, filtering in or out of certain words,
looking for fields like title:, domain:, host:, url:, and others, and use parameters such
as language, file type, date and country.
Startpage tools will let you search for images by size, color and type, but it won’t let
you easily pick a time frame or change safe search settings.
Startpage allows you to visit some pages and view some images anonymously, but that’s
not always the case if a website doesn’t support anonymous visits.
Ixquick.eu Following Startpage is ixquick.eu.
This European based metasearch engine also aggregates search results from other engines.
It’s owned by the same parent company as startpage, and has the same look and functionality.
And that’s pretty much all that can be said about this alternative.
It has the same settings, same features.
It will only work differently – the attempt is to display the most relevant results as
aggregate from all search engines and not just Google.
So if you want a startpage like search engine that doesn’t just rely on Google ixquick
can be a way to go.
Duckduckgo.com The last search engine on the list is my most
favorite and currently my default option.
Duckduckgo mind not sound like a genius start up but it’s actually a self funded independent
search engine that has a profitable business model and can actually take on Google’s
user base.
The site has been growing on popularity and has made it into the top 500 most visited
websites in the world according to Alexa.
The site is incredibly user friendly, gets out of your way completely, and is feature
rich.
None of this compromises your privacy.
The search engine will conveniently offer quick answers based on most relevant websites,
about page using Wikipedia, maps, meanings, definitions, news, videos, images, and of
course the web.
You can easily filter your results by region and time, change safe search settings in two
clicks, change themes if you prefer Google color scheme, customize appearance, and tweak
number of settings like directions source, advertisements, auto-suggest, units of measure
and more.
You can even save all these settings in URL parameters to avoid using cookies.
Duckduckgo otherwise doesn’t use any cookies with your search by default.
No personally identifiable information are stored on the companies servers.
Duckduckgo like many other privacy search engines makes money by showing ads to affiliated
links for which the company earns commissions.
No personal information when users click these links are transferred to third parties.
For that additional anonymity Duckduckgo lets you use their search engine on Tor at onion
version of the site.
From my perspective, I think DuckDuckGo balances privacy and relevant search results the best
out of all other alternative search engines.
Therefore I set it up as my default one, although I do turn to startpage occasionally.
Some people have complained for irrelevant search results on DuckDuckgo but only you
can tell for yourself.
For me it was good enough, especially in combination with the features and onion link.
I don’t endorse any one search engine over the others.
The choice is yours based on whichever merits you prefer.
I wish all of the search engines great luck, longevity and prosperity.
We need to have more options and diversity that’s so necessary for healthy Internet
ecosystem.
Which Google Search alternative do you use yourself?
Are you satisfied with the results they provide when compared to Google?
Do you like the features as well?
Let me know in the comments and show your support by liking and sharing the video.
My goal is to contribute to protection of our digital rights and open Internet by making
videos that help people understand the vital events that shape the world of Internet Age.
Subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos like this in the future.