Escape from Google: 12 privacy-promoting search engines reviewed

John Leonard
clock • 18 min read

If you can live without personalisation there are plenty of alternatives

Yippy

Yippy‘s core business is enterprise search, but it offers a free web search engine too. Originally released as Vivisimo Clusty before being spun out as Yippy, the company touts its use of IBM's Watson AI platform to cluster search results into meaningful categories.  

The company insists it has no need to log user activity since its revenue comes from enterprise search appliances. There also are no ads or third-party tracking scripts. However, IP address and browser features are recorded for the duration of the session.

There are news, video and image channels, but few filters or sorting options upfront, meaning that Yippy is best suited for research-type queries where you need to be able to drill down into the detail, rather than more general search. There's a preview feature so you can see what the linked page is about before opening it. There are no apps for mobile.

Pros: Offers an alternative approach to finding what you need, preview, handy for researchers

Cons: No apps, dates shown are frequently time last crawled not published, no apps

Gibiru

Gibiru describes itself as un "uncensored anonymous proxy search

engine", publishing results that Google censors. Search results are grouped under ‘all results', which brings back the sort of links you'd expect, or uncensored which is generally a hodgepodge of conspiracy sites with just a marginal connection to the search term - unless you're looking for chemtrails or something similar. Uncensored image search is definitely NSFW.

The site feels pretty snappy but is occasionally plagued by 403 errors, even when the same search had worked just fine 5 minutes previously. The spaceman logo (entering the wormhole) and black and red colour scheme of the web search are a matter of taste.

Gibiru's developers make money through commission on ad referrals.

It does not track users or store their personal data, and searches are encrypted,

There are mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Pros: If the conspiracy rabbit-hole is your thing, this could be the place to start burrowing

Cons: Strange errors, UI, a bit limited - no video tab or anything other than web and images

Continues

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