Brave Search, developed by Brave Software, the same company that developed the privacy-focused Brave browser, has broken free from Google and Bing's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Instead, it now runs separately, with each search result retrieved from a dedicated index. Users who prioritize privacy can disable this feature and conduct manual searches, such as "things to do in [location]."
Aside from prioritizing privacy, Brave Search is growing its utility by offering unique tools like the AI-powered Summarizer. True to its name, this tool provides a brief paragraph summarizing the search results' origins. A newly updated Discussions section collects comments from platforms such as Reddit. Furthermore, 'Goggles', which is still in beta, allows users to customize their search results by removing celebrity content, filtering news based on political affiliation, or limiting results to the top 1,000 websites. Developers can also submit their own custom Goggles to improve the search engine's capabilities.
Startpage acts as a search engine aggregator, not a straight web crawler. It uses a metasearch approach to retrieve results from various search engines, like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others, and prioritizes common links across several sources.
This platform appeals to people who want Google-like results without having their search history tracked and stored. It also provides a URL generator, a proxy service, and HTTPS support. Also, the URL generator improves privacy by avoiding cookie collection and instead using a memory system that follows user choices.
Related: Beyond Chrome: 5 Private Browsers for Better Security
Mojeek is a search engine based in the UK that prioritizes user anonymity. Although its index is much smaller than Google's, all of its content is produced in-house. Its search results may not always appear in the expected order, but you can usually locate what you are looking for. Mojeek's search by emotions feature is unique and clever because it utilizes deep machine learning to identify the emotions expressed on a webpage. You can enter your search term and then select whether you want results that are cheerful, furious, sad, and so on. Additionally, Mojeek allows you to search for photos via Bing and Pixabay. Other distinctive features include custom Focus searches, such as recipe searches, and Substack article searches.
Mojeek is the first search engine to implement a no-tracking policy, and it promises to never sell or distribute your personal data. This is a significant advantage for users who value their privacy.
