Best generic and alternative search engines that can be used to find websites without accounts and without leaving traces

Unfortunately Google and other famous search engines have a reputation for track every user activityso as to be able to resell search profiles to advertising companies interested in selling customized products (via online banners).
In this guide we will show you the best private and anonymous search enginesuseful to use if we particularly love privacy and are looking for a valid alternative to Google to search for content on the web, in particular web sources that are not accessible or not indexed on Google.
READ ALSO: 50 Sites to search for anything on the internet
1) DuckDuckGo
The first truly free search engine that totally respects your privacy is DuckDuckGo.
The search engine is quite precise (although inferior to Bing and Google) and does not pose any type of censorship, not even for protected content: you can find torrents and files to download, normally not indexed by Google out of compliance with the DMCA.
A true point of reference in the open source community given that this search engine does not track any user activity and does not show any targeted advertising windows, as much more famous competitors usually do. If you want privacy and want to see everything on the web without filters, this is the search engine you need to use.
2) Presearch
Presearch is a recently released search engine, which integrates results from Google, Bing, Wikipedia and other sources. The most interesting peculiarity is its nature open source and decentralized, therefore without a central server. Furthermore, by registering on the site, it is also possible to receive payments in the form of cryptocurrency.
In addition to this technical peculiarity, the site offers integrated search, not only on the web but also on X, DuckDuckGo, Booking and other sites, to provide completeness of the results.
Presearch works very well, has very attractive graphics and, using the Google and DuckDuckGo index, provides complete results for every online search. You can also customize the homepage with icons from your favorite sites.
3) StartPage
Among the good alternatives to Google that respect privacy it could not be missing StartPage.
This search engine aims to obtain the same results obtainable with Google, but removing all information that can be used to track users.
4) Qwant
Another search engine that aims to respect user privacy is Qwant.
This engine respects the privacy of every user and boasts one of the most complete homepages you will ever see from a search engine!
Trending videos are always available under the search bar, plus in the sidebar we can quickly start a search on the web, on social networks, on images and videos, or start a global search to get all the results in one place. page.
The searches are quite fast and precise, even if we are currently far from the results obtainable with other search engines.
5) Ecosia
Ecosia is a search engine is very special, because it helps plant new trees around the world using the advertising revenue generated during searches.
If we carry out a search on Ecosia, we will see harmless advertising banners appear: all of them Revenue generated from these banners is used to help the environment. Definitely an original and fun way to lend a hand to the planet while doing research on the Web.
The searches are definitely very fast and also quite precise, so we can easily use it every day while also helping planet Earth.
6) Other anonymous search engines
The ones seen above are the best private and anonymous search engines, but we can test others too search engines that do not track users during searches and show several results not available with Google. The best alternatives are:
- Searx: free search engine that searches over 83 sources to show search results, leaving no trace of our passage through each of them.
- Swisscows: an anonymous search engine without any type of advertising tracking and with family-friendly content (family filter active by default on all searches).
- MetaGer: a multi-source metasearch engine that boasts free source code and uses only solar and wind energy to run its servers, making it the 100% ecological search engine.
- Search Encrypt: search engine focused on total privacywhere each request is encrypted, making it impossible to trace the PC, user or device that carried out a specific web search.
- Mojeek: another valid multisite search engine that makes privacy and ecology its strong points.
- Brave Search: search engine based on the famous Brave browser capable of making all search results anonymous, thus preventing us from being tracked while we search for our contents on the web.
We use these sites as homepages for our browsers, perhaps within anonymous and secure browsers as an example Mozilla Firefox.
Conclusions
Nowadays it is not mandatory to use traditional search engines to search the web, but we can also rely on private and anonymous search engines, which do not track users like traditional sites.
Most sites do not use tracking cookies, encrypt searches and do not store what we type on the keyboard; in some cases there is also a certain ecological footprint which doesn’t hurt, even at the expense of a few small announcements.
To learn more we can read our guides on how Search the internet while protecting your privacy with DuckDuckGo and StartPage and on Best sites to search for images and photos on the internet.