How do private search engines make money?

There is a growing number of private search engines providing alternatives to Google and Bing. While the new search engines keep your searches private they still have a business to run, if they aren’t non-profit initiatives. 

The private search engines and metasearch engines listed below are free to use. They do earn money when you use their services, but the good thing is that they will still respect your privacy when you search.  A search engine like Givero* takes it further and gives away half the money they earn to good causes.

Private search engines are using contextual ads and affiliate links to monetize

These private search engines are companies with owners or investors with the goal of running a profitable business, except for Searx which is a non-profit initiative receiving donations to keep its service running.

Here is a list of the various search engine monetization models:

• Advertisements as the top results – a well-known model, for example, Google and Bing, where a number of the top results are advertisements. Advertisements are marked with more or less visible tags that they are actually advertisements and not necessarily related to your search results. On private search engines, the ads are contextual, which are directly related to your search query alone.
• Online shopping search – When you see a list of products above or at the side of the search results they are often from an affiliate partner’s product feed. The search engine will receive a few cents when you click a product and visit the online shop. The EU has fined Google for breaching antitrust rules when promoting shopping results from their own service  – learn more about the antitrust case here [VIDEO]
• Affiliate links in results – When the search engine shows results, some of the results may be shown with additional characters attached to the URL which will register when you click the result. This is typically done for eBay and Amazon links and is a shopping partnership called an affiliate link.  Note: It can be hard to tell whether a result is an affiliate link or not when they are mixed up with other results Note: you should notice that organic results are mixed or replaced with affiliate links for eg. eBay.
• Donations – If a service is non-profit, you can support the service with a direct donation. Wikipedia is a well-known example of this model.