How to keep your searches private

Your searches tell both search engines and advertisers a lot about you, letting them target you with ads for products and services they know you will like. Plus, to keep you on their sites longer, the big search engines will show you results tailored to what you normally like to view, putting you into a filter bubble. 

How can you stop this tracking and get access to unbiased, unfiltered information?

Use a private search engine

Keep your search and browsing history private and use a private search engine.

1. Use a private metasearch engine – This is one step up from using the big search engines directly. The metasearch engine anonymises your query before fetching results from one or more of the bigger search engines. But these bigger search engines may (and do) still deliver biased results to the metasearch. 

2. Use an open-source private search engine – A real search engine builds its own index, not relying on another service to explore the web and find results. 

Read more about the differences between metasearch and search engines.

When a search engine is open source, anyone can check the code at any time and make sure that both the index creation and result list you see are unbiased. Because open-source code can be audited, the community can ensure you are definitely not being tracked – that you are definitely searching in private.