Search Engines - Cyberguard

Startpage

Centralized

Metasearch Engine

Startpage is a search engine that provides Google search results with complete privacy protection, increasing your security. Startpage BV is a trustworthy Netherlands-based company.

Notes:
Startpage’s majority shareholder is System1 which is an analytics company. This should not be an issue as they have their own Privacy Policy.

According to their Privacy Policy, they only log details such as: operating system, type of browser and language. They do not log your IP address, search queries or other identifying information.

Website

DuckDuckGo

Centralized

Metasearch Engine

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that claims to not track you. It provides search results sourced from Microsoft's Search Engine called Bing, but with complete privacy protection against Microsoft. The core of DuckDuckGo is proprietary.

Notes:
DuckDuckGo is an American company.

Their Privacy Policy states they do log your search query, but not your IP or any other identifying information. DuckDuckGo offers a Tor Hidden Service for increased anonymity, and a Lite Version which is HTML only (no JS).

Website

Qwant

Centralized

Uses its own index/DB

Qwant is a search engine with its philosophy based on two principles: no user tracking and no filter bubble. Qwant also offers a mobile browser (for Android & iOS) based on Mozilla Firefox, with Qwant as the default search engine.

Notes:
Qwant is a French company.

While Qwant's core is not completely open source, it is believed that Qwant does not unethically track you in any way. Qwant seems to take numerous precautions to limit untrusted third parties from gaining insight into user search queries.

Website

Searx

Decentralized

Open Source

Metasearch Engine

Searx is is an open source decentralized metasearch engine which pulls results from many different search engines including Startpage, Google, Wikipedia, and much more, with complete privacy protection.

Notes:
Searx is completely open source and is decentralized. Because of this, it is the most trustworthy, reliable, and secure.

Searx does not have its own index. It is a metasearch engine that fetches results from numerous other search engines. Essentially, Searx is a proxy between the user & the search engines that it aggregates results from.

Website

Brave Search

Centralized

Uses its own index/DB

Brave Search is a closed-source centralized search engine utilizing its own search database, rather than relying on other search engines, as DuckDuckGo, Searx, and Startpage do.

Notes:
Brave Search was developed by the developers behind the popular privacy browser - Brave Browser.

The company behind Brave Search is based in the United States. Brave claims to temporarily process some personally-identifiable-information such as IP addresses, and that such data is not retained in their system.

Website