Google has dominated search for so long that, for most people, ‘Googling’ and ‘searching the internet’ became the same thing. But that dominance has come with trade-offs that have bothered people for years – targeted advertising based on tracking your every move, search results increasingly cluttered with ads and low-quality content, and a company that knows an uncomfortable amount about you.
More and more people are choosing to move away from Google products – in fact, there is even a word for it: ‘degoogling’. And while it can be quite complicated to stop using some of Google’s services, it is relatively simple to opt for a different search engine for your day-to-day internet searches. Alternative search engines have existed for a while. Some are built around privacy (they don’t track you, profile you, or sell your data) and some are trying to build genuinely better results. Others are just trying to give you back the web we used to know and love.
Google has also been making the biggest change to its search in over 25 years. Instead of a list of links to click, it puts you in an immersive AI-generated answer engine that is built around shopping. For people who live to shop, that will feel helpful. For everyone else – those who want actual sources, to browse actual websites, or simply to think for themselves – it’s the final straw.
If you’re frustrated with your Google experience and looking for other ways to search the world’s information, here are some alternative search engines to explore.
Kagi: alternative search engine
Kagi is a search engine entirely supported by its users, with monthly subscription tiers. This funding means that Kagi has no ads and no need to track users or sell their data. Kagi has a quality-over-quantity mindset and has its own search results as well as extensive customisation. Searches are not saved or linked to user accounts. Kagi has a unique business model in not collecting personal data. In fact, they actually down-rank sites that contain lots of ads and trackers. There is a free option, currently capped at 100 searches per month. They only take an email address for the free account. Paid plans start at $5 a month.
Experience: The results page is really nice with big video thumbnails and a little shield icon you can click to learn more about the website before you visit. The AI-powered summary isn’t visible unless you click on the ‘Quick Answer’ button at the top of the page.
Ecosia: alternative search engine overview
Ecosia was founded in 2009 by Christian Kroll (based in Germany) and is focused on green issues, specifically reforestation. It does have ads but uses the profits to fund its projects, with monthly financial reporting on the blog and transparency around planting programmes and other initiatives. It works closely with conservation organisations and local communities to restore and protect biodiversity hotspots. It doesn’t plant monocultures or invasive, non-native species.
You can opt to create an account and use that to track your impact. Ecosia claims it will never sell your data to advertisers and does not create a monetisable ‘profile’ of users. There is a setting that allows you to switch personalisation on and off. It uses Microsoft Bing to provide search results as well as its own search algorithms (which means that Microsoft benefits directly when someone clicks on ads). It’s currently building a partially independent European index in partnership with Qwant.
Experience: The results page is nice, with thumbnails for video content and related searches to the site. The AI-powered results are kept in a separate tab.
Startpage: alternative search engine
Launched in 2002, Startpage uses Google search for results and ads – although the ads are clearly marked and different from the actual search results. Because it acts as an anonymous proxy, Startpage is a good way to get Google results without Google knowing who you are. Ads are provided based on the current search query rather than a user profile (as they do not collect search histories), but the ad revenue is still going back to Google.
Startpage is based in the Netherlands, which means it operates under European privacy law (not US law) and can’t be compelled to hand data over to US surveillance programmes. It doesn’t log your searches, doesn’t track you, and doesn’t build a profile on you. In 2019, an American company bought a majority stake in Startpage. The Dutch operation remains independent, European privacy law still applies, and independent audits haven’t found any change in how your data is handled. But if the idea of any American corporate involvement bothers you on principle, you might want to factor that in.
Experience: The no-frills results page is refreshing and there is no AI. There’s also a very nice feature which places a “Visit in Anonymous View” under every result so that you can visit those links without the sites seeing who you are.
Mojeek: alternative search engine
Mojeek was founded in 2004 and is based in the UK. It’s free, has no ads, and is perhaps the best example of what a genuinely independent search engine looks like. Its results are provided by its own index created by crawling the web – not Google or Bing results. It doesn’t collect personal data, store IP addresses, use tracking cookies, or build user profiles. Because its results come from its own algorithms rather than Google’s, you genuinely get a different view of the web. However, while everyday general queries have good results, you might experience occasional gaps for niche or highly specific queries.
Experience: Mojeek’s search results are very minimalist (there’s no site logo or icon next to each listing, just the link and description). No AI summaries.
DuckDuckGo: alternative search engine
Founded in 2008 and based in the USA, DuckDuckGo is a privacy-focused search engine – no tracking, no histories, no personalisation, and no filter bubble – where everyone gets the same results for the same query. It uses multiple sources for results, including Microsoft Bing, and its own crawlers, though none from Google. Its revenue comes from contextual ads (based on the search query alone) that use Microsoft’s ad network. DuckDuckGo has also expanded into email protection, app tracking blockers, and an alternative browser.
In 2022, the company received criticism after the revelation of a secret agreement with Microsoft that allowed certain Microsoft trackers to bypass its blocking tools. While this loophole was closed, some people may still feel its privacy credentials to be somewhat flexible.
Experience: The results page has thumbnails for photos and videos. An AI ‘Search Assist’ panel at the top can be toggled on or off.
Brave: alternative search engine
One of the few engines building a genuinely independent index instead of rerouting Bing or Google, Brave is strong on privacy with no tracking or profiling. The index is still maturing, so you will occasionally hit gaps in results. The ads on Brave are privacy-first, or you can pay for a premium ad-free experience. The company also makes a browser with a controversial ad-replacement model (it strips ads from websites and inserts its own), which has attracted criticism from publishers. That’s separate from the search engine but reflects the company’s broader ethos, which not everyone trusts.
Experience: The results page includes thumbnails for photos and videos, plus a panel of Reddit answers. There is an AI-powered summary at the top, which you can toggle off in the settings.
Bing: Microsoft’s search engine
Released in 2009, Bing is Microsoft’s challenge to Google, although it still only has around 5% of the global search market compared to Google’s 90%. Bing has good results, including for video and image search, and is baked in with Microsoft products. You can use it as an anonymous user (not logged in) or using your Microsoft account.
Like Google, Microsoft displays personalised advertising, creates data profiles for targeted ads, and tracks users across third-party websites for advertising purposes. You can opt out of some of this, but the company does not respond to “Do Not Track” signals from browsers. Like Google, Microsoft runs its own ad platform – Microsoft Advertising – so the ads you see in Bing results are served directly by Microsoft, not a third-party ad network.
Whether Bing is a viable alternative to Google depends on how you feel about having your data collected and monetised by yet another unaccountable global tech giant.
Experience: The results page is busy, with too many panels, features, and buttons. The AI-based ‘Copilot Search’ at the top is dominant, and there doesn’t appear to be any way to disable it.
Specialist search tools & libraries
The search engines above are all alternatives to Google for everyday browsing. But there are also numerous specialist search tools and libraries that don’t try to index the whole web but instead go deep into a specific corner of it. Many of these focus on academic, scientific, and scholarly material – serious, verified, peer-reviewed information that can get buried in regular search results. If you’re researching something properly, here are some trustworthy sources:
refseek.com searches billions of sources – including encyclopaedias, books, and magazines – filtering out the commercial clutter to surface academic and educational material.
worldcat.org searches the catalogues of tens of thousands of libraries worldwide. Useful if you’re looking for a specific or obscure book and want to find the nearest library that holds a copy.
link.springer.com gives access to over 10 million scientific documents, including books, articles, and research papers. Some content is behind a paywall, but a significant amount is free.
bioline.org.br is a library of peer-reviewed bioscience journals from researchers in developing countries, much of whose work never makes it onto mainstream academic platforms.
repec.org is a volunteer-run archive of over 5 million publications on economics and related fields, contributed by researchers from over 100 countries.
science.gov is a US federal government search engine covering over 2,200 scientific websites and more than 200 million articles from government-funded research.
base-search.net is one of the largest indexes of academic content on the web, with over 400 million documents. Around 60% of them are free to access.
gutenberg.org is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks, mostly classic literature and historical texts whose copyright has expired.
archive.org is a vast free library of millions upon millions of books, music, films, audio recordings, software, and historical documents that are either out of copyright or have been donated for public access.
web.archive.org, or the Wayback Machine, stores snapshots of websites going back decades and is useful for finding pages that have been deleted or changed and for checking whether information has been altered over time.
ebsco.com is a major academic database covering peer-reviewed journals, research papers, and publications across most fields of study. Access is usually provided free through libraries and universities.
Notes about the search monopoly
So what’s the problem with using Google to search? Surely, given they have been doing it for so long, they must be the best at it? Well, the issue isn’t so much about quality as it is about what you pay for that quality – with your data, your privacy, your exposure to advertising-distorted results, and increasingly your autonomy as Google shifts from SHOWING you the web to TELLING you what the web says.
When the company was launched in 1998, its mission was to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Today, with revenues coming almost exclusively from advertising, its true mission is to act as storefront. Its new AI-driven immersive search experience is designed for shopping. The rest of the internet is an afterthought.
Having just one for-profit company deciding what you find, what you see, and what you’re told is problematic on many levels, including:
- Control and autonomy: when one company mediates what you find, it shapes what you think exists. If Google doesn’t surface something, for most people it effectively doesn’t exist. That’s a lot of power over public knowledge and discourse.
- Privacy: Google’s business model is built on knowing who you are, what you want, what you fear, and what you’re likely to buy. Every search is a data point in your profile. People increasingly object to that on principle, not just practically.
- Filter bubbles: personalised results mean two people searching the same thing will get different answers. Your past behaviour shapes what Google shows you, which reinforces existing viewpoints and limits exposure to anything outside your established patterns.
- Commercial distortion: results are shaped by advertising revenue and SEO, meaning that what ranks highly isn’t necessarily what’s most useful or truthful, only what’s been most aggressively optimised or paid for.
- Dependence: outsourcing your information-finding to a single corporate intermediary atrophies your own ability to navigate knowledge. You stop developing judgement about sources because someone else is pre-sorting everything.
- Concentration of power: beyond the individual, there should be huge concern about any single private entity having this much influence over how billions of people understand the world. It’s a democratic and structural worry as much as a personal one.