Private Search Engines Compared

By Bill Hartzer · Updated 19 August 2026

Compare the structure, not the promises

Almost every private search engine says the same four things: no tracking, no profiling, no logs tied to you, no selling your data. Those statements are close to unfalsifiable from the outside. What is checkable is the architecture around them, and it varies enormously between engines that make identical promises.

Four questions do most of the work.

Who else receives your query? An engine with its own index — its own crawled copy of the web — can answer you without telling anyone. An engine without one has to forward your query to whoever supplies its results. That is not a policy question; it is a consequence of how the product is built, and no privacy policy can change it.
Which country's law applies? Not just where the servers are, but where the operating company and its owner sit, because legal compulsion follows corporate structure.
Where does the money come from? An advertising business has a permanent structural incentive to know more about you. A subscription business has a billing identity it must keep. A donation-funded project has neither, and no runway.
Which claims have been independently checked? Very few have. Distinguishing “verified” from “stated” is the single most useful thing a comparison can do, and almost none do it.

None of this means the promises are false. It means you should know which engines are asking you to trust a policy and which have arranged things so that trust is not required.

Who receives your query

This is the axis that surprises people, so take it first.

Nobody but the engine: Brave Search, Mojeek and Marginalia each run their own crawler and index, so a web query is answered in-house and never leaves. Brave removed its last Bing API calls on 27 April 2023 and added its own image and video indexes that August. Mojeek has never resold anyone's results at any point in its history. Marginalia crawls the web from a small published IP range in Sweden. Whatever else you conclude about these three, there is no second company on the other end of the request.

A supplier receives it, anonymised: DuckDuckGo forwards to Microsoft, because Bing supplies its ranked web links. Startpage forwards to Google and Bing — that is the entire product. Swisscows forwards to Bing under what its own blog calls an exclusive partnership. Ecosia forwards to Bing and Google alongside the European index it part-owns. Qwant forwards to Bing for queries where it judges its own relevance insufficient, and for images. In every case the engine's position is that the supplier sees the engine's infrastructure and not you. That is a real protection and a weaker one than never sending the query at all, and it depends on an arrangement neither party publishes.

It depends who you are trusting: SearXNG forwards to whichever engines the instance is configured to query. Self-hosted, the only party who sees your queries before the upstream engines is you. On a public instance run by an anonymous volunteer, you have transferred your trust rather than removed it — nothing in the software prevents an operator logging everything, and the public instance tracker measures uptime and TLS grade, not honesty. There is also a counter-intuitive trade: a single-user self-hosted instance gives perfect protection from the operator and the worst crowd anonymity, because every query the upstream engine receives from that address is yours.

Jurisdiction, and who owns the company

United States: DuckDuckGo (Pennsylvania), Brave Software (California), Kagi and Gibiru. All are subject to US legal process. DuckDuckGo's and Brave's answer is the same and it is a legitimate one: they do not retain data linking a query to a person, so there is little to compel. It is a different defence from a jurisdictional one, and readers whose threat model specifically excludes US infrastructure should notice the difference.

European Union: Ecosia is a German GmbH; Qwant is French; Marginalia is operated from Sweden. GDPR applies and there is no direct US CLOUD Act exposure at the operating entity — though for Ecosia and Qwant, the queries served by Bing or Google do reach a US company regardless.

United Kingdom: Mojeek, a company registered in England. Worth stating honestly rather than glossing: the UK sits outside the EU's enforcement structure and has the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, a more aggressive surveillance regime than most EU states'. Mojeek's protection is data minimisation, not legal muscle, and it is a small company with none of Google's capacity to fight compulsion.

Switzerland: Swisscows, which is a genuine jurisdictional advantage and does not change the fact that Bing answers the queries.

The complicated one: Startpage's operating company, Surfboard Holding B.V., is Dutch. Its majority owner since around 31 December 2018 is Privacy One Group, a subsidiary of System1, a US-listed performance-advertising company — a stake that was not disclosed publicly until October 2019, which is why PrivacyTools delisted the engine that year before relisting it after clarifications. Startpage's position is that the operations are firewalled and its founders retain veto authority over privacy-affecting changes. Whether US legal process could reach Startpage user data through the parent has not, as far as any public record shows, been tested.

Nobody, and everybody: SearXNG has no company at all. It is AGPL free software with distributed volunteer maintainers. That closes off a specific failure mode that has claimed several nominally private engines — free software cannot be bought and quietly turned — and it also means there is no accountable operator when something goes wrong.

How each one is funded

Advertising funds most of the field: DuckDuckGo (predominantly through Microsoft's ad network), Startpage, Brave, Ecosia, Qwant, Mojeek and Swisscows all sell ads matched to the query rather than to a behavioural profile. The design point is that search advertising on commercial-intent queries is valuable from the query text alone, which is why a private engine can be ad-funded at all.

Several have added a second line. DuckDuckGo sells a privacy subscription bundling a VPN, personal-information removal and identity-theft restoration. Brave sells an ad-free search subscription and, more significantly, a search API — independent web indexes are scarce, so AI developers who need grounding data will pay for one. Mojeek sells web-search and site-search APIs for the same reason. Kagi is the only major engine funded primarily by subscription, which removes the advertising incentive entirely; the trade is that it necessarily holds a billing identity, which a free ad-funded engine does not.

Ecosia is structurally the most unusual. In October 2018 its founder transferred his shares into a steward-ownership arrangement with the Purpose Foundation, permanently surrendering the right to sell the company or take profits out of it. Ecosia cannot be acquired and cannot pay dividends. That is a stronger guarantee than any privacy policy, and it is about mission rather than privacy — Ecosia is a climate company that runs a search engine, and treating it as an anonymity tool is the commonest error made about it.

Marginalia runs on donations, grants and small API deals, at operating costs its own site puts at roughly $200 a month. SearXNG has no business model at all. Both have privacy properties that are structural rather than promised — no advertising business means no commercial reason to build a profile — and both carry real sustainability risk in exchange.

What has actually been verified, and what has not

Very little in this category has been independently checked, and the honest comparison says so.

Startpage holds the European Privacy Seal (EuroPriSe), awarded in 2011 and recertified in 2013 and 2015 — a genuine third-party certification, and the first held by any search engine. No recertification covering the post-2018 System1 ownership or the post-2023 Bing integration has been found. Reproducing “EU privacy certified” without those dates is the single most misleading thing that can be said about Startpage.

Kagi's Privacy Pass is the most substantive technical privacy mechanism in the field, because it is cryptographic rather than contractual: it issues tokens that prove entitlement to use the service without revealing who you are, so searches cannot be linked to an account or to each other. Its documented limits matter and are usually omitted — a monthly token cap per account, availability only on the higher-priced plans rather than the entry tier, and a scope covering search authentication rather than the AI assistant. See Kagi's own documentation for the current limits.

DuckDuckGo has the most examined record, including the episode that damaged it. In May 2022 a researcher found that its browser permitted Microsoft-owned trackers to load on third-party sites while blocking Google's and Facebook's; the company confirmed the cause was a restriction in its Microsoft syndication agreement, and announced in August 2022 that it would block those scripts. Two things are true: the exception concerned third-party script loading in the browser rather than search logging, and the company had not disclosed it while marketing itself on tracker blocking. Nothing has ever shown DuckDuckGo storing personal search histories.

Mojeek has a shallow but reproducible check in its favour — a 2025 inspection with uBlock Origin found no trackers on its pages — and no formal audit. Marginalia is AGPL open source, so its claims are readable rather than trusted, with the caveat that privacy then depends on one person's server practices. Swisscows' policy is more nuanced than its marketing: it does handle IP addresses and masks the final octet, which is a real mitigation and weaker than not receiving the address at all. Ecosia has been a certified B Corp since April 2014, which assesses social and environmental performance and is not a privacy audit. Brave, Qwant, Kagi and Swisscows have no published independent privacy audit that this site could locate.

Two entries deserve a warning rather than a comparison. Gibiru markets itself as a fully anonymous, uncensored, independent engine; it has never published a crawler, a user agent or an index size in seventeen years, its founder described a modified Google feed in 2012, independent testing in 2022 reached the same conclusion, and reviewers as recent as 2026 cannot identify who runs it. Presearch has claimed its own index since September 2025 without publishing a crawler name, user agent or index size, while its own privacy policy still logs which provider answered each search. Unverifiable self-attestation from an unidentified operator is the wrong foundation for anyone with a genuine threat model.

What private search does not do

Three limits are worth stating because they cause real disappointment.

It is not anonymity. A private search engine stops the engine from building a profile of you. Your internet provider still sees that you contacted it. The sites you click through to still see you arrive, still set their own cookies and still run their own analytics. If your threat model is a network observer or the destination site, you need different tools — a proxy view of the destination page, of the kind Startpage's Anonymous View offers, addresses the second problem but not the first.

It does not change what you are shown. A proxy inherits its supplier's ranking, its supplier's omissions and its supplier's filtering decisions. The privacy layer changes who is watching, not what is on the page. If your objection to Google is editorial rather than surveillance-based, a Google proxy does not answer it.

It does not reduce the concentration of search. Startpage pays Google and Microsoft for the results it relays. The data flow changes; the money flow and the market structure do not. Readers whose real goal is a less concentrated search market need the short list of engines that crawl the web themselves, which is a different list from the privacy one — and only Brave, Mojeek and Marginalia appear on both.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most private search engine?

It depends which risk you are managing. For never sending your query to a third party at all, Mojeek, Brave Search and Marginalia are the only options that qualify structurally, because each answers from its own index. For EU jurisdiction, Qwant, Ecosia and Marginalia are European. For cryptographic separation of identity from queries, Kagi's Privacy Pass is the strongest documented mechanism. For total control, a self-hosted SearXNG instance.

Is DuckDuckGo really private?

Its search privacy claims have held up: no credible finding has ever shown DuckDuckGo storing personal search histories, and its privacy policy states it saves no IP address or unique identifier alongside searches. The asterisk is structural — because Bing supplies its web links, the query text reaches Microsoft, without your identity attached. The 2022 controversy concerned Microsoft trackers loading in DuckDuckGo's browser on other sites, not search logging, and was resolved that August.

Is Startpage better than DuckDuckGo for privacy?

They protect different things. Startpage's operating company is Dutch and therefore under GDPR rather than US jurisdiction, and its Anonymous View proxy is a feature nothing else offers as smoothly. Against that, its majority owner since December 2018 is a US-listed advertising company, its EuroPriSe certifications date from 2011 to 2015 and predate that ownership, and it relays queries to both Google and Bing. Neither is straightforwardly better.

Do private search engines still send my searches to Google or Bing?

Most do. Startpage relays to Google and Bing, DuckDuckGo's web links come from Bing, Swisscows states an exclusive Bing partnership, and Ecosia and Qwant both blend Microsoft or Google feeds. The engines that do not are the ones with their own index: Brave Search, Mojeek and Marginalia. That is a structural difference, not a policy one, and it is the clearest single distinction in the category.

Are private search engines' privacy claims audited?

Rarely. Startpage holds European Privacy Seal certifications from 2011, 2013 and 2015, which predate both its current ownership and its Bing integration. Kagi documents a cryptographic mechanism, Privacy Pass, that limits what it can link. Marginalia and SearXNG publish their source under the AGPL, so claims can be read rather than trusted. Brave, Qwant, Swisscows, Mojeek and Ecosia have no published independent privacy audit.

Does a private search engine hide me from my internet provider?

No. It stops the search engine profiling you; it does nothing about the network path. Your provider can still see that you connected to that engine, and the websites you click through to still see you arrive and can still track you with their own cookies and analytics. Private search is one component of privacy, not the whole of it, and it is often sold as more than it is.

Is a self-hosted SearXNG instance the most private option?

From the operator's point of view, yes — you are the operator, and the code is open. But it is the least anonymous in the crowd: if you are the only user, every query the upstream engines receive from your address is yours. A busy public instance gives better crowd anonymity and requires trusting an anonymous volunteer with root on the machine your queries pass through. There is no configuration that wins on both axes.

Which private search engines should I be careful about?

Any engine that claims an independent index without documenting a crawler. Gibiru has marketed itself as a fully anonymous, uncensored, independent engine for seventeen years without publishing a crawler name, user agent or index size, and independent testing in 2022 concluded its results were routed through Google. Presearch announced its own index in September 2025 with no crawler documentation, while its privacy policy still logs which provider answered each search.

Private search engines compared