What are Privacy-Focused Search Engines?
A privacy-focused search engine is a search engine with some sort of privacy features. This term has become kind of a buzzword, and what it really means boils down to: "we aren't Google or Bing," except that that isn't even really true in many cases, as they are just Google or Bing. Let me explain why.
The biggest privacy risk with Google, in my humble opinion, isn't that Google records everything you search on Google, or that it personalizes the results based on a profile it builds from what you searched on Google. Instead, the real problem that in order to use Youtube, or to get a free e-mail account ending in @gmail, you need to create a Google Account, and if you search while logged into your Google Account, everything you searched gets saved into your Google Account profile. That is a real problem. You could solve this by simply not logging into Google every time you want to search for something, and while there are several ways to do this, they're all terribly inconvenient.
Not Very "Private" Search Engines
Thus so-called "privacy-focused" search engines were born, like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Swisscows, StartPage, MetaGer, SearX, among others. These search engines provide the worst kind of privacy. All they do is act as a proxy between you and Google, or, in most cases, between you and Bing. When you search on StartPage, StartPage just sends what you searched for to Google and Bing and shows you the results. By doing this, Google won't know you are logged into Google, because Google only sees StartPage connecting to it. They also won't know your IP address. But on the other hand, StartPage knows everything you search, and they also know your IP address. So all that ends up happening is that you have to trust StartPage with your privacy instead of trusting Google with your privacy. SearX is particularly problematic, since anyone can run an instance, a SearX instance could be run by just some guy who is like "trust me, bro."
More privacy-focused search engines are search engines that have their own index, like Brave Search and Mojeek. These search engines don't need to send your queries to Google and Bing, so your queries never leave their systems to go to third-parties.
Both "private" search engines above need to make money somehow, and they choose monetize with ads. This is why I don't think they're the best alternative to Google.
That's probably because, unlike many, I don't think the personalized ads that Google offers are a violation of privacy. To me, a violation of privacy is when you share someone's data with someone else. Google doesn't do this. Google provides tools for advertisers to target people based on their interests, but they do not share your user data with those advertisers. Advertisers never get to know what's your e-mail address, your youtube account, which youtube videos you watched, or what you searched for. All they can do is target someone who is interested in gaming, and Google, not the advertisers, will check your search history, and see that you have searched for "Silksong's release date" every single day for the last 5 years, and Google will conclude "yep, this guy is a real Gamer with a capital G" and that's how you get shown ads for browser-based gacha games that you'll never play.
It's creepy, yes, but it's not really a breach of privacy, and it's not really that much different from a search engine that uses the text of your query to match which ads to display on the page.
In summary, it's not the search engines above are particularly private, it's just that Google is particularly not, so any alternative looks private by contrast.
The Best Search Engine for Your Privacy
Kagi is the best search engine for your privacy. Unlike other search engines, Kagi is a paid search engine, which means you pay to search, you are a customer, not a product. Kagi has no ads. It has no incentive to share your information with third-parties. If Kagi commits privacy violations, its customers leave, and Kagi goes bankrupt, so it's probably not going to do that, it's going to strive its best to keep your information confidential and its customers happy.
The Worst Search Engine for Your Privacy
If you thought Google was the worst search engine for you privacy, you were wrong. It's actually Bing.
Just like Google is actually just a search engine, and becomes a privacy nightmare if you have a Google Account, Bing is also just a search engine that's generally inferior to Google, which becomes a becomes a privacy apocalypse if you have Windows 11.
You see, Microsoft programmed Windows 11 in such way that if you open the start menu and type something to find a program installed in your computer, or a file that you have in your PERSONAL computer, Windows just sends everything you typed to Bing to search the Internet for it, right from your start menu.
But there's more. In order to install Windows 11, you need* to create a Microsoft Account. Which means your PC is tied to an online account and also tied to everything you typed on your start menu. Or at least could be. You have to trust Microsoft isn't using all this for nefarious purposes, but how could anyone trust someone who does this to other people's computers?
*There are ways to avoid this, but it's clearly Microsoft's intention to violate the privacy of as many Windows users as possible.
The "Privacy-Focused" Browsers
As an addendum, I think it's funny that one of the privacy problems Google does have is that Google Chrome can potentially tie every webpage you visit to your Google account, so one would think a good idea for privacy would be not to have a web browser and a search engine from the same vendor, but then DuckDuckGo releases its own "privacy-focused" browser, and Brave, which was a privacy-focused web browser, releases its own search engine, and now even Kagi is launching Orion, and on top of that everyone is also using AI now, and how knows what cans of worms that's going to open.
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