You don’t have to use Google to look something up online, and there are plenty of reasons not to—among them avoiding the privacy concerns that come with a mammoth corporation knowing so much about you from your web activity. Some alternative search engines offer other benefits, such as rewards or donations to worthy causes based on how much you search.
While the quality of results between Google and any other search engine used to be a real issue, now you’d be hard-pressed to find much difference. Indeed, several of the best alternative search engines use privatized results from Bing and Google, while others have built their own web-crawling site indexes. The greatest difference you're likely to notice is the ranking of the top results. So if you think one megacorporation doesn’t need to know every little detail about you and profit from your information, or that one company shouldn’t control more than 90% of the world’s web searches, check out the best search alternatives to Google.

Coming from the innovative creators of the privacy-focused Brave web browser, Brave Search claims “unmatched privacy.” In my testing using the EFF’s Cover Your Tracks Tools, Brave was the most private browser, so the claim has some weight behind it. According to Brave, “We don’t track you, your searches, or your clicks. Ever.” There’s no account to sign in to, your IP address is used to localize results but isn’t stored, and you can turn off that access. When I enter a search in Brave Search, my ad-and-tracker blocker, uBlock, doesn’t report anything to block. Brave gets its results both from its own web crawling index and “anonymous API calls to third parties.”
Aside from privacy, Brave Search is building out new features, like the AI-powered Summarizer, which, as its name suggests, produces a paragraph summarizing the source results for your query. A new Discussions section on the result page aggregates comments from Reddit and the like. Finally, Goggles is a beta feature that lets you customize your results with parameters like No Celebrity content, News from the Left or Right, or only results from the top 1,000 websites. Developers can submit their own Goggles to the search engine.
The biggest name in private search deserves your attention. DuckDuckGo (or DDG, to its fans) has a simple privacy policy: “We don’t collect or share any of your personal information.” The search interface is super simple, and results are on target in my experience, though they lack the extensive info panels found in Bing and Google. Search for images, videos, news, maps (beautiful ones, courtesy of Apple), and shopping results. A nice touch is that DuckDuckGo adds more header options depending on the search term, such as Definition, Meanings, Nutrition, and Recipes.
My tracker blocker uBlock reported trackers on DuckDuckGo result pages, though they were from DuckDuckGo itself. For the ultimate in privacy, DDG offers a Tor .onion version of its search engine. If you like DuckDuckGo, you may be interested in its browser, too. The company has browsers for mobile devices and now also offers desktop browsers for Windows (in public beta) and macOS.
Ecosia makes people feel good about their web searches because it contributes to planting trees in environmentally sensitive areas. Ecosia's program has planted more than 180 million trees to date, in collaboration with local environmental organizations around the world. This search site doesn’t deliver the most polished results pages, but I can find what I need nearly all the time.
In terms of privacy, the site says it does not “create personal profiles of you based on your search history" and anonymizes all searches within one week. uBlock Origin did find (and block) some Bing trackers, but the site is upfront about using cookies, which you can disable. Those tree bills don’t pay themselves.
For a search experience that's as close to Google in terms of richness of information on the result page—and in many cases even more useful instant result cards—Bing is it. Yes, it too is from a giant tech company, though one that’s a far cry from being a search monopoly. According to Statcounter, Bing receives only about 3% of search traffic worldwide and about 6.5% in the US.
You could say that Bing has vaulted past Google in capabilities, with the introduction of Bing Chat, an astonishing AI search bot powered by ChatGPT. For me, the most remarkable part is that it remembers the context of your queries in subsequent queries, so you can refine a search without typing out the whole thing. It's also the best among AI tools in providing links to its sources. Google still only offers a closed beta of its search AI and a public beta of the separate Bard tool, which the company labels an "experiment."
Bing is the most full-featured contender in this group, with new AI Bing Chat search and content generation, strong news, image, video, and map searching capabilities. Bing is known for superior image and video search options. Visual search lets you drag a picture or take a photo for your search. It also offers voice search and can answer your queries out loud if you want.
Mojeek is a UK-based search engine with a focus on privacy. Its index is completely built in-house, though it's considerably smaller than Bing or Google’s. The results are occasionally in an unexpected order, but you can usually find what you want. A clever and unique feature of Mojeek is its search by emotions, which uses deep machine learning to analyze the feels of a webpage. You enter your search term and then choose whether you want a result that’s happy, angry, sad, and so on. It also lets you search for images courtesy of Bing and Pixabay. A couple more differentiators are its custom Focus searches (for example, recipe search) and its Substack article search.
Mojeek doesn't have a lot in the way of prepackaged, graphically designed answers like you get with other search sites. For example, searching for Major League Baseball scores still just shows links. Some result pages do feature a Wikipedia card, matching what a lot of higher-profile search sites do. In terms of Mojeek's security and privacy, uBlock didn't find any trackers it needed to block, and the site claims to be the first with a privacy policy stating that it doesn’t track you or sell your data.
Privacy is the real mission of this decentralized, Web3 search site. Presearch is the only service listed here that doesn’t run on a single company’s servers, instead anonymizing your queries with distributed nodes so your information isn’t saved by any single provider. My uBlock tracking cookie blocker found nothing to block with Presearch.
If you sign in to an account, you can customize the search provider buttons from an extensive list, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google. Signing in also lets you earn Presearch’s Ethereum-based crypto token, PRE, though only if you stick with Presearch's own search engine, and there are caps on how much cryptocurrency you can earn each day. Anyone can run a node server in the distributed system to earn PRE rewards, and advertisers use PRE when bidding on keywords. Be aware that there are a lot of user reviews online claiming the inability to withdraw their PRE tokens, however, so go for the decentralization and multi-search; don't expect a financial reward. I've had better luck with Bing Rewards on that front.
From the EU comes the anti-Google search service Qwant. Qwant has an appealing design and uses its own indexing robots to scan webpages for results, though it makes use of APIs from Microsoft Bing, Twitter, YouTube, and iTunes. Maps are based on the open-source OpenMapTiles, and you can privately save your map history. Qwant also makes a kid-friendly version of its search site, called Qwant Junior.
When using Qwant, users can be certain that their browsing history isn’t stored, they aren’t profiled, and they aren’t targeted through personalized ads. Though uBlock showed several tracker cookies it deemed worthy of blocking, they were all from the qwant.com domain because it appeared in one of uBlock’s block lists. The site clearly states, “We do not track or collect our users' data… When using Qwant, users can be certain that their browsing history isn’t stored, they aren’t profiled, and that they aren’t targeted through personalized ads.” 
Seekr has an original take on search, but now it's just for news stories. It uses machine learning to rate results on reliability and ideology. The result pages show whether each link leans right, left, or center. It also shows a result’s reliability, meaning whether it’s clickbait or uses an exaggerated title. For news results, you can use sliders to filter for higher reliability or left or right political leans. Since Seekr's evaluations are algorithmically based, they work on any English-language websites around the world. Seekr doesn’t yet rate non-English sites but has that on its roadmap.
The company claims it’s building its own web index, but it uses Bing for map results. Seekr isn’t really a privacy-focused search service. uBlock found four tracking cookies worth blocking, among many others deposited. The company’s privacy policy states that it may share your data with “business partners to improve the quality of advertising you see.”
Seva is named for the Sanskrit word meaning "selfless service." Like Swisscows and Ecosia, Seva's aim is to turn your search into donations to charitable causes—its twist is to have you organize into teams for this fundraising. The site lets you donate to the following charities: Best Friends Animal Society, Eden Reforestation Project, Elliot For Water, Ocean Heart, SaveUkraine.org, St. Jude’s, and World Food Program. For privacy, the site doesn't track or store your searches. Its results are very bare-bones, without the cards and helper content you find in the bigger names in search, and it passes image, video, and news on to Google. Maybe that's why the uBlock Origin tracker blocker extension found lots of Google trackers to block on a Seva result page.
Startpage uses privatized Google search results. The company makes a bold claim, saying it's the world’s most private search engine. You get choices of Web, Images, Videos, and News when searching. Its Anonymous View option lets you click on a mask icon next to a result to view the found web page via a proxy server, without providing any data about yourself to the site you’re visiting—except to Startpage itself. Before sending the query, Startpage removes your IP address and any other info and only then submits the query. The uBlock ad- and tracker blocker only blocks Startpage's own ads and finds no third-party trackers.
Switzerland-based Swisscows offers a VPN, a private messaging app, and private email as well as this privacy-focused search site that donates to worthy causes when you use it. Nefarious sites and adult content are not included in Swisscows’ results, so it’s a good choice for younger users. In addition to having the typical Web, Images, and Video search result filters across the top, Swisscows has a Music option, which lets you play tunes from the free Soundcloud service. On the result page, you can use a clever Anonymous preview so that the found site you want to visit doesn’t know you’re viewing it. It’s just an image of the site that’s not clickable, but you can read a whole page without any tracking. uBlock Origin didn’t have to block any suspicious trackers, a good sign for privacy.
The once-dominant and later-derided Yahoo Search has gotten its act together lately. The main Yahoo page has a search box at the top and panels for news, weather, sports, and trending searches, plus a button for the company’s storied email service. If you head to search.yahoo.com, you now see a simpler page with trending searches and buttons for Yahoo's other services, including the highly regarded Yahoo Finance.
Yahoo’s search result pages feature quick answers, though not in as quite a polished format as Bing and Google. That said, among the services included here, Yahoo Search has the fullest answer pages after those two big players. Yahoo uses Bing to power search results, though it also has its own technology for a panel of Trending searches and other features. uBlock Origin blocks trackers from both Google and Bing, though Yahoo's maps are provided by the excellent open-source Open Maps service.
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