“Inquiring minds want to know what other inquiring minds are inquiring about.” Snarky Friend.
Web search engines are an indispensable tool to help you find what you’re looking for online: what your inquiring mind is inquiring about. Unfortunately, most large search engines are data collection tools that profile you and sell your information to data brokers. Search engines may also censor your search results, denying you visibility into information you have a legitimate right to access.
Data brokers sell your profile to advertising companies which use your data to target you with advertisements. Your information is also sold to other interested parties—financial, healthcare, insurance, government—where your data may be used in ways that adversely affect you. This all happens behind the scenes and without your informed consent.
Most search engines do not respect your privacy and autonomy. You are the product, not the customer.
Private search engines provide great results while also respecting your privacy. They generally limit censorship. Most private search engines are technically metasearch engines. They pull and aggregate information from other search services such as Google and Bing. A few have their own “crawlers” to build and maintain their own search indexes.
- Search engine features to consider include:
- Service provides private, anonymous search
- Services does not collect or sell your personal information
- Service supports https encrypted connections
- Service integrates with common browsers
- Service provides some transparency in results ranking
- Service financial model encourages good behavior: options include contextual advertising, affiliate programs, and donations
- Query responses are fast and provide good results
Given the current state of the marketplace, there is only one private search engine I recommend: Brave Search. Brave Search is provided by the same company that offers the Brave web browser recommended in a prior post. It meets all the criteria above and has it’s own search engine. It is financially supported through contextual advertising. It comes integrated into the Brave web browser by default.
The link to Brave Search is: https://search.brave.com/
To add Brave as a search option in the Firefox desktop browser, from the menu (three horizontal bars in the upper right-hand corner), select Extensions and themes. Enter Brave Search in Find more add-ons, and then install the Brave Search extension. Then select “Settings” and then “Search.” Scroll to the bottom and select Brave Search as your default search engine.
In the Firefox phone app, from the menu (three horizontal bars in the lower right-hand corner,) select “Settings/Search/Add Search Engine.” Enter “Brave” as the search engine title, and the following as the URL, “https://search.brave.com/search?q=%s” Enter “Save.” At the top of the Search screen, you can set “Brave” as your default browser. (This should be easier, sorry).
If you wish to explore further, MetaGer and DuckDuckGo are reasonable alternatives.
To take full advantage of private web search, always search using a private web browser with your VPN enabled.
Which web search engine did Alice and Bob choose? As you recall, Alice has a Windows 11 PC to support her personal IT consulting business and a MacBook Pro for personal use. She carries an iPhone for both personal and business calls. Bob has a Windows 11 PC for gaming and an Android phone which he only uses for phone calls. Both installed privacy-modified versions of Firefox for web browsing.
And both added Brave Search to Firefox and set it as their default search engine. Alice appreciated the speed and accuracy of the search results. Bob appreciated that fact that it used its own search index and was not contaminated by those “other” big brother search engines.
Now you must choose. Protect your privacy. Only search the web with a private web search engine.
On to a discussion of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.