We all know that Google and Bing are tracking everything when we look up something also, both search engines have to much Ai when you are searching sometimes Ai is helpful not when you are just looking to find a certain website you can not remember, you know it icon you are looking for. So I have been using two search engines a lot for the last couple of months.
- StartPage is based in the Netherlands and is very privacy focused and you can create a link that if you set are you main search in any browser, they will not add or use cookies, which is a great thing for privacy, the search is pretty good. Startpage uses google indexing but does not pass on information about what or who is searching, which is a good thing.
- Duckduckgo is american but it is very privacy focused, it has DuckAi which is not on by default, some of the result are pulled from Bing and a few more, plus its own search bot, they have a paid subscription which has a few good things in it, VPN, advanced AI Models for searching, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration. It also has apps and it own browser based of the chromium fork, if you dont want to install a new browser you can add most of the features to your favourite browser with extension’s.
- Qwant is a search engine from France is pretty good but is limited in certain areas, it did use bing api for a web and image serach, in 2025 it changed it indexing bot. During 2025 is created a 50/50 company with Ecosia called European Search Perspective. It getting better and working nice it may not take on google but is build a platform for Europeans by europeans it work to add to your list of serach engine in your browser.
- Ecosia is a European serach engine that used Bing, Google and Wikipedia for results but it has started to use it own bot that it is build ing with Qwant, so It also trying to become a portal instead of a trying to take on Google. Ecosia has a chat to which is power by Mistral AI (French company)
Each search engine has its pros and cons so you need to ty each one out for yourself and decided which one the one for you to set as your default search. The one that i have used the most is duckduckgo that my choice and thats the one ä’i have set as my default serach on all my browsers.
The other thing you could look at is to use Ai as your search engine if you want.