If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives
Swisscows
The oddly-named Swisscows is a wholesome family-run search engine run from a datacentre that's buried under an Alp. It is family-friendly, private and anonymous. What's more, its workings are positioned away from the nine-eyes of the EU and US. "All the servers are located in Switzerland and neither the US nor other data snoopers can get their hands on this information," the company says.
As for the search itself, Swisscows uses Bing to obtain its results (presumably obfuscating the searcher's details like Startpage; the company has yet to respond to a request for more information). There's a music search based on Soundcloud and also a translation engine powered by Yandex.
Swisscows is mostly financed through tracking-free advertising using a technology similar to Google AdWords but with no user data passed to the advertiser. There's an Android App and the search recognises. 10 different languages.
Swisscows uses Bing for web search, although the German language version uses its own search index. It also has image search (Bing), music search (SoundCloud), and a German-English translator (Yandex), and there's also a new service called Digest which summarises documents so you can get the gist of what they're about without reading the whole thing.
On the results page what catches the eye is the Semantic Map, basically a tag cloud of related terms. However, we found this to be mostly a gimmick simply bringing a colourful GUI to the ‘related searches' function that many search engines have while using a fair bit of real estate. The default search brings back German versions of Wikipedia, whereas regional searchers can be selected pick from a dropdown as it doesn't seem to use IP address for this. You can also filter results according to recency.
A nice feature is being able to watch YouTube videos on Swisscows without redirecting to Google's privacy-sapping site, although this function is blocked at source for quite a few videos.
Pros: Quick, quirky, Swiss location builds trust, watch YouTube anonymously
Cons: Semantic Map is gimmicky, occasional ‘something went wrong' error messages
MetaGer
MetaGer is another metasearch site, this one run by the German non-profit free-speech organisation SUMA E.V. It interrogates 50 different search engines for results, as well as having crawlers of its own.
By default, it operates in German, but you can switch to English or Spanish for most features (not maps though). Ads are served on a non-tracking basis, using only the first two blocks of the IP address to give a general location. Joining SUMA eliminates the few ads you will otherwise see. MetaGer is available as a TOR onion site.
The search results feature an "Open Anonymously" option, allowing users to connect to the site via a proxy, similar to Startpage's Anonymous View feature. This is a nice touch for the privacy-minded. Mapping duties are taken care of by a version of OpenStreetMap. MetaGer has been running for 24 years and its source code is hosted on Gitlab.
Pros: Open source, longstanding - trusted, Open Anonymously feature
Cons: UI is a little clunky, no video search
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