Search engine

TL;DR. Use Kagi. $10/month, no ads, no tracking, genuinely better results than Google for most technical queries, and they own a real crawler (Teclis) plus licensed partners. You pay with money instead of data. Brave Search is the free alternative with an independent index; DuckDuckGo proxies Bing honestly. We earn a commission when you sign up via our Kagi links — doesn’t change which tool we’d pick. See /en/legal/affiliate for the full list.

What this category protects

Your query log. Google retains every search, links them to your account when you’re signed in, links them to a NID / SID cookie graph when you aren’t, and feeds the ad-targeting profile that drives Search ads, YouTube ads, display ads across the 2M+ AdSense publisher network, and Gmail promotions tab targeting. Your 10-year search history is a memoir of every health symptom, every financial question, every relationship crisis. Google treats it as a corporate asset.

Search queries cross-pollute with the rest of the tracking graph. A signed-in search on google.com federates the login signal to every G-property for the session. Referrer headers leak the query to any result you click. Third-party cookies and storage on result pages carry the session ID to destinations. Moving to a non-ad-funded engine cuts all of that.

This just works: Kagi

Paid search. $10/month Standard (300 searches), $25/month Professional (unlimited) — most users get away on the lower tier if they set Kagi as the default and stop googling casually. No ads, so no incentive to optimize result ranking for time-on-page or ad clicks. Instead, results are ranked for usefulness as judged by paying users who complain when they’re wrong. Custom “Lenses” and per-site weightings let you downrank the AI-slop farms and content mills that Google rewards. Uplift: results for programming, medical, and academic queries are routinely better than Google’s. Downside: uncommon e-commerce and local results can trail.

Kagi owns a real crawler (Teclis) and licenses additional index data from Google, Mojeek, Marginalia, Yandex, and Brave Search, weights them, and returns a blend. What you give up: $10/month. And when you fall back to an ad-supported engine, everything you typed at Kagi stayed private, but what you type next won’t. You have to commit.

Alternatives

• Brave Search — free, independent index (no longer a Bing proxy; brave-search-independence crossed 100% in 2023). Fastest private option, no account required, results quality trails Kagi for niche queries but beats DuckDuckGo. Good default for cost-sensitive users. Optional AI summary “Answer with AI” runs on Brave’s inference.
• DuckDuckGo — proxies Bing’s index, serves sponsored Bing results, no personalization per their policy. Honest about the proxy model. Solid free default; you inherit Bing’s content quirks.
• Startpage — proxies Google, strips the tracking parameters and referrer. Google quality because it is Google. Dutch, SOC-audited. Pick if you miss Google’s results but not its surveillance.
• SearXNG (self-hosted) — meta-search aggregator on your own server. Pulls Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Wikipedia, arxiv, and dozens more, deduplicates, blends. Needs a VPS; public instances exist on searx.space.

Comparison matrix

Engine	Ads	Algorithm	Price	Account required	Bias disclosed
Kagi	No	User-ranked + custom lenses	$10 / $25 mo	Yes (paid)	Yes (source weights public)
Brave Search	No on default; optional AI	Independent index	Free	No	Yes (Independence meter)
DuckDuckGo	Bing-supplied sponsored	Bing proxy + own	Free	No	Yes (“Bing proxy”)
Startpage	No	Google proxy	Free	No	Yes (“Google results, stripped”)
SearXNG (self-host)	No	Meta-search aggregator	Free + hosting	No	Configurable per instance
Google	Yes (aggressive)	Google Search	Free	No (but signed-in enriches)	No

Common mistakes

• Setting Kagi as default in one browser. The other three devices you use — phone, work laptop, iPad — are still feeding Google. Set it everywhere or give up on the privacy claim.
• Private search while signed into Google in the same browser. Federated-login state undoes it the moment you click a result. Log out, or container-isolate Google-required sites.
• Expecting search privacy to cover the landing page. The destination site still sees your IP, fingerprint, and arrival cookies. Search privacy is one layer.
• Trusting AI-summary features without source-checking. Every engine is adding them. They hallucinate. Starting point, not answer.
• Falling back to Google “when Kagi doesn’t work.” It works 95% of the time. For the other 5%, use Brave Search or Startpage — not Google.

Setup

No dedicated guide yet (Kagi signup is a 60-second thing on their site). The browser-side of this is covered in the browser category — set the search engine in the browser you picked.

Related categories

• Browser — where you set the default search engine.
• Email — if you signed up for Kagi, use an alias instead of your primary address.
• Payments — pay Kagi with a Privacy.com virtual card and the payment trail stays bounded.