Best Privacy-Focused Search Engines
Privacy-friendly search engines protect your search history from being logged, sold, or used for profiling. Unlike Google or Bing, these tools do not track your IP, store your queries, or share your data with advertisers. Whether you want a metasearch engine, an independent crawler, or a paid ad‑free alternative, here are the best options for private searching.
SearXNG
SearXNG is an open source, configurable, self-hostable metasearch engine that compiles results from countless search engines in the same place.
Brave Search
Brave Search indexes its own results with Brave's crawlers while respecting user privacy.
Mullvad Leta
Mullvad's Leta used the Google Search API as a proxy to deliver Google results privately. It also proxied Brave Search results.
UPDATE: Leta has been permanently shut down.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a metasearch engine with mainly Bing results and an emphasis on user privacy.
Startpage
Startpage is a metasearch engine with privately proxied Google and Bing results.
Kagi
Kagi is a paid search engine that promises privacy with a sustainable business model. No ads, no tracking.
Qwant
Qwant leverages its proprietary European-based index with strict privacy protocols, routing search queries through EU data protection frameworks to minimize user tracking and deliver uncompromised search results while maintaining comprehensive search coverage.