How to keep your searches private
- March 26, 2019
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 used for re-targeting 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 search engine – This is one step up from using the big search engines directly. The data collected in a private search engine eg. your query are used to fetch results from one or more of the bigger search engines. But the data is not shared or used for re-targeted advertisment.
2. Look beyond privacy – trust and transparency from the business or service are as important as wearing your tinfoiled hat, so ask yourself if you find the service trustworthy and use your common sense. If you look at the business model too, a search engine like Givero.com* has made a choice to look beoynd being data-ethical, and shares its gross revenue with good cause of your choice.
Comparison of private search engines
If you want to search in private there is a number of private metasearch and search engines available. But what are the advantages and disadvantages of each one? See the comparison chart and make you choice.
How do private search engines make money?
If you want to use a private search engine, one of the question that often is askes is “How do they make money?”. There various ways a search engine can keep you privacy and make money. See the comparison chart and learn more about private search engines.
Features of private search engines
You might think you’ll lose some features when you start using a private search engine, but there are actually a number of search engines with many great features that let you search in private. See the comparison chart and learn more about private search engines.