[babypistol]

I have used DuckDuckGo a couple of years back, but, after some more consideration switched back to Google. Apart from privacy I never really liked the direction DuckDuckGo was going in (more below). Just recently I decided to search for an alternative search engine once again.

Things I want to consider are:

1. Reasonable privacy - I don't want the search engine to take super invasive steps to track me (but still keep in mind that I need to send my queries to someone, so there's really no expectation of full privacy)

2. No personalization - I want to be sure that only obvious parameters affect the ranking of search results (e.g. manual language or location selection, manual time selection, ...). Want to avoid personalization and a search bubble at all cost.

3. No results processing - I want links to original sources, not processed or aggregated information with little or no references to sources.

4. Independence - I'd like to support a search engine that can operate as independently as possible. A search engine with it's own crawler seem far more resilient to external influence than a meta or proxying search engine.

Google falls short on 1, 2 and 3. But holds up very well on 4.

With Bing or Yandex I don't have much experience, but expect something similar.

DuckDuckGo heavily advertises 1. I guess 2 follows from it but didn't find it mentioned as an explicit goal. On 3 and 4 it falls short. If I remember correctly DuckDuckGo was one of the first to offer processed results (Instant answers). I'm not sure about the situation now, but I believe it started of as a meta search engine and proxied most searches to Yahoo, Bing or Yandex. https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... still lists Bing prominently.

Startpage.com seems to get me 1 and 3. But 2 is questionable since the results are still tailored by Google (not to me personally, but it's still not clear what factors into ranking). And 4 obviously doesn't apply.

To find a better alternative I started looking for search engines with independent web crawlers. So far I found mojeek.com, beta.cliqz.com and qwant.com. mojeek.com looks good on 1,2,3,4 but results aren't quite good enough. With Cliqz I'm not sure about personalization, but otherwise looks good.

I finally settled on Qwant.com for now. It promises privacy and no personalization explicitly. Has an independent crawler. Sometimes it tries to provide a processed answer card, but so far I managed to ignore that. Results are surprisingly good.