What Swisscows is, and where its results actually come from
Swisscows is a Swiss-operated search engine built on somebody else's index. The index is the stored copy of the web that an engine's crawler has collected and that its ranking software sorts; Swisscows does not have one. Type a query into swisscows.com and what comes back is Microsoft Bing's web results, rendered without tracking cookies, without an account and without a behavioural profile.
This is not an inference drawn from testing. Swisscows says it in its own words. The company's blog describes an "exclusive partnership with Bing" and states that "the financial basis of our company is created by search ads generated by Bing." The privacy policy separately discloses that search advertisements from Microsoft Bing and Google are displayed inside iFrames. A company that names its results partner and its revenue partner in its own documentation is being straightforward.
So the verdict at the top of this page reads resold results, a structural description rather than a criticism. Plenty of useful search products resell a partner feed on purpose. What matters is that a reader who picked Swisscows to reduce the number of large American companies handling their searches should know that every Swisscows query is answered by Microsoft.
What genuinely separates Swisscows from Startpage or DuckDuckGo is not the privacy model. It is that adult material is filtered out permanently, with no toggle. Family-friendly search is the accurate description of the product.
The German-language index claim
The most persistent factual dispute about Swisscows concerns whether it has an index of its own after all. English Wikipedia's article states that Swisscows uses Bing for web search but has developed its own index for German-language queries, and that line has been copied into a great many secondary write-ups.
The claim has a real origin. Swisscows launched out of Hulbee AG, whose original pitch was semantic search: a German-language data set indexed by meaning rather than keyword, with results clustered into a tile cloud of related concepts. That interface was the product's signature feature for years and it was not vapour.
What can be verified today is narrower. Swisscows and Hulbee did build semantic indexing technology, and Swisscows currently sources its web results from Bing under a partnership it calls exclusive. Whether a proprietary German index is still live, still merged into results, and in what proportion, is undocumented: no crawler name, no user-agent string, no bot information page, no robots.txt guidance and no current index-size statement. An engine running its own crawler would normally publish at least one of those, because site owners need to know what is hitting their servers.
This page therefore treats the German index as a historical capability rather than a measurable current contribution. Both sources are recorded: Wikipedia says own German index; the company's current blog says exclusive Bing partnership.
Non-web verticals come from named third parties as well. Music search has been served through SoundCloud, translation through Yandex, and video through the YouTube API, the last confirmed in the current privacy policy, which subjects video use to YouTube's terms and Google's privacy policy.
Who runs it, and how it makes money
Swisscows is operated by Swisscows AG, a Swiss company. The search engine was originally launched and run by Hulbee AG, founded by Andreas Wiebe, with the company base historically given as Egnach in the Canton of Thurgau. Wiebe has been the founder and public face throughout. The exact date and legal mechanics of the Hulbee AG to Swisscows AG transition are not documented in any primary filing or press release this page could locate, and the company's own About page does not describe it.
The revenue model has two halves. The first is advertising, but the advertising is Microsoft's: Swisscows takes a share of revenue on Bing-served search ads, which its blog names as the financial basis of the business. The second is subscription — a paid Swisscows Pro tier plus a family of paid privacy products listed on the company's About page: a VPN, Swisscows.email and Edelcloud storage, alongside the TeleGuard messenger. No figures are quoted here, because subscription tiers change and a page that states them as current fact goes stale. TechCrunch reported an angel round for Hulbee AG in October 2015; the figure is in that article and is not restated here, because Swiss angel-round numbers in the technology press are frequently company-supplied.
The structural point is that Swisscows' economics are downstream of Microsoft's. The search business does not fund itself from an index it owns; it funds itself from a revenue share on ads served by the partner that also supplies the results.
Privacy: the marketing line and the actual policy
Swisscows' marketing says no tracking, no data collection, no profiles, anonymised queries, and that the company stores no data. The privacy policy says something more nuanced, and the nuance is to the company's credit.
The policy discloses that Swisscows does handle IP addresses and masks the final octet, giving a worked example: an address of 146.185.79.104 becomes 146.185.79.0 after masking. Account data is retained for as long as an account exists and deleted when the account is removed. Government requests are said to be carefully reviewed by the company's legal counsel. Data is stated to be held on servers in Switzerland and not shared with external technical subcontractors, with the company subject to Swiss law while also complying with the EU GDPR.
Last-octet truncation is a genuine mitigation and more than many engines do. It is also weaker than never receiving the address at all. A /24 block, a timestamp and a query string are not a strong anonymity guarantee against a determined correlator. Treat it as reduced exposure, not elimination.
Two further points a Swisscows user deserves. First, Swiss jurisdiction changes who can compel disclosure, not whether anyone can: Switzerland operates its own lawful-interception and data-retention regime under BÜPF and VÜPF, and server geography alone is not a technical guarantee. Second, because the web results come from Bing, the query must reach Microsoft for results to exist at all. The protection on offer is that Microsoft receives the query without the user's identity attached — the same proxy model Startpage uses. It is de-identification in transit, not non-transmission.
No published independent audit, third-party teardown or transparency report for Swisscows was located. That is not evidence of wrongdoing; it means the privacy claims rest on self-attestation, and a reader is entitled to know which of the two they are getting.
The permanent family filter, and what it costs
Most engines ship a safe-search setting and let the user change it. Swisscows does not: adult content is filtered at the source and cannot be re-enabled. For a school machine, a shared family computer or a device handed to a child, that is the entire value proposition — no configuration, and no risk that somebody quietly flips a switch.
The cost is that Swisscows returns less than the Bing index it draws on. Legitimate research touching adult subject matter is degraded or blocked: sexual-health questions, medical queries using anatomical vocabulary, harm-reduction material, journalism and legal work about the adult industry, academic study of sexuality. That is a real handicap, and it lands on exactly the queries where a user is least likely to notice that results are missing rather than nonexistent.
The filter is a deliberate trade: comprehensiveness given up for a guarantee. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on the machine it is running on.
History and how it got here
- 2014 — Swisscows launches out of Hulbee AG, founded by Andreas Wiebe in Egnach, Switzerland. The Hulbee-branded predecessor and the Swisscows brand overlap here, and sources are not consistent about which name launched when.
- October 2015 — Hulbee AG is reported to have raised an angel round to expand the privacy search engine.
- 2018 — company leadership cites 20 million monthly search queries. This is a company-supplied figure, now eight years old, and it should not be read as a current usage number.
- January 2021 — Hulbee launches TeleGuard, a privacy-focused messenger, broadening the business beyond search.
- Subsequent years — expansion into VPN, email and cloud storage under the Swisscows brand.
- 19 August 2026 — swisscows.com resolves and serves results; the engine is still operating.
No lawsuits, breaches, regulatory actions or ownership disputes were located — an absence of findings rather than a certification that none exist. Nor is there a current market-share figure: Swisscows is not broken out in StatCounter's global or European data and falls inside the residual "Other" bucket, so any percentage quoted for it should be treated as unsourced unless it names a methodology.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It suits anyone whose actual requirement is a search box for a school, family or shared machine that will not surface pornography and will not build an advertising profile. Swisscows does that job with no configuration, and a permanent filter is a stronger guarantee than a setting. Its privacy policy is also more specific than most in this category — the worked octet-masking example is the sort of detail a document written purely for marketing does not contain.
It does not suit three groups. Anyone who chose it believing they were funding an independent index and reducing Big Tech's share of search: they are routing to Microsoft with a Swiss letterhead. Anyone doing medical, legal, journalistic or academic work touching adult subject matter, because the filter silently removes material they need. And anyone who requires verified rather than asserted privacy, because there is no independent audit here.
Result quality is the other limit. Swisscows can only be as good as Bing, and the filter makes it deliberately narrower. If Bing does not have it, Swisscows does not have it.
Common misconceptions
"Swisscows has its own index"
The most common error, propagated by the Wikipedia line about a German-language index. The company's own current statement is an exclusive partnership with Bing, and no live own-index contribution has ever been documented with a crawler name, user-agent or index size.
"Swiss servers mean nobody can get the data"
Switzerland has its own lawful-interception and retention regime. Jurisdiction changes which authority can compel disclosure; it does not put data beyond compulsion.
"It doesn't store anything, so my query never leaves"
The query necessarily reaches Bing, or there would be no results. What Swisscows removes is the identity attached to it.
"The semantic tile cloud is AI search"
It is keyword and semantic clustering, and it long predates the current generation of generative answer engines. No dated primary announcement naming a model behind any Swisscows AI feature was located, so this page does not describe it as an AI search engine.
"Family-friendly is just a default setting"
It is not optional. Users who assume they can turn it off for research will find that they cannot. Sources for the statements on this page are listed below, including the company blog post that describes the Bing partnership (blog.swisscows.com) and the privacy policy containing the octet-masking example (swisscows.com/en/privacy).
Frequently asked questions
Does Swisscows have its own index?
No documented live index of its own. Swisscows' own blog describes an exclusive partnership with Bing, and Microsoft's index answers the web queries. Wikipedia states that Swisscows developed an index for German-language queries, a claim traceable to Hulbee AG's original semantic search technology, but no crawler name, user-agent, bot page or index size has ever been published, so any current contribution is undocumented.
Is Swisscows owned by Microsoft?
No. Swisscows is operated by Swisscows AG, a Swiss company originally trading as Hulbee AG and founded by Andreas Wiebe. The relationship with Microsoft is commercial rather than corporate: Bing supplies the web results and Bing-served search ads provide what the company calls the financial basis of the business. Ownership is Swiss; the results and the revenue are Microsoft's.
Can you turn off the Swisscows adult filter?
No. Unlike the safe-search toggle on most engines, Swisscows filters adult content permanently and offers no way to disable it. That is deliberate and it is the product's main differentiator. The consequence is that Swisscows returns less than Bing does, and legitimate sexual-health, medical, harm-reduction, legal and academic queries touching adult subjects can come back degraded or empty.
Is Swisscows actually private?
Its privacy policy is specific and unusually candid, disclosing that IP addresses are handled with the final octet masked, that account data is deleted when an account is removed, and that servers sit in Switzerland. But there is no independent audit, no third-party teardown and no transparency report, so the claims are self-attested. And because Bing answers the queries, Microsoft receives them without your identity attached rather than not at all.
Where is Swisscows based, and does that protect me?
Switzerland, with the company base historically given as Egnach in the Canton of Thurgau, and the privacy policy states that data is stored on Swiss servers. Swiss jurisdiction means Swiss legal process rather than the US CLOUD Act governs compulsory disclosure. It does not mean disclosure is impossible: Switzerland operates its own lawful-interception and data-retention regime under BÜPF and VÜPF.
How does Swisscows make money if it doesn't track you?
Two ways. Search advertising served by Bing, on which Swisscows takes a revenue share and which the company's blog names as its financial basis, and subscriptions to a paid Swisscows Pro tier plus a family of paid privacy products including a VPN, email and cloud storage. The ads are contextual to the query rather than targeted at a stored profile.
How many people use Swisscows?
There is no reliable current figure. Company leadership cited 20 million monthly search queries in 2018, which is company-supplied and eight years old as of August 2026. Swisscows is not broken out as a separate line in StatCounter's global or European data and falls inside the residual "Other" category, so any current market-share percentage attributed to it is unsourced.