Beyond Google: Here are four search engines that respect your privacy

According to StatCounter, more than 9 out of 10 online searches today use Google, leaving its competitors, Bing and Yahoo!, fighting for scraps. And yet, a few other players are still trying to get in on the action, setting themselves apart mainly with their privacy policies. Such is the case with Qwant, which just launched a new homepage.

Qwant

First released in 2013, Qwant bills itself as a search engine that offers different types of results (web, social networks, news, etc.) on a single page. Its new version, released this week, allows you to access these results via a new pared down homepage. Qwant.com has a responsive web design and benefits from infinite scrolling so you can visualize a maximum of results without having to click to the next page, no matter the device you use.

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Described as a "search engine that respects your privacy," Qwant promises not to filter internet content, nor to track its users, all with an ad-free guarantee.DuckDuckGoA champion of privacy rights, DuckDuckGo is a metasearch engine that compiles web, photo and video results from other search engines (Bing, Yahoo!, or Wikipedia, for example) all without ever collecting cookies or IP addresses from its users. It does, however, list sponsored links.

The search engine "that doesn't spy on you" is rapidly rising in popularity, especially among privacy conscious geeks. DuckDuckGo is also available through the anonymity network Tor.

Ixquick and Startpage

In the same style as DuckDuckGo, Ixquick even bills itself as "the world's most private search engine." Its results represent the compilation of a consultation of a dozen search engines (including Google), all without the slightest IP address or browsing data being recorded. A star-based scoring system indicates how many times a result has figured among the top ten responses of the search engines consulted.

A version called Startpage concentrates solely on Google results, all without collecting any personal information, and thus bills itself as the perfect alternative to the Mountain View giant.

AFP