You share your most intimate secrets with your search engine without even thinking: medical, financial and personal issues, along with all the day to day things that make you, well, you. Google could do this too; they just chose not to— all that tracking is to power their ad networks so that ads can follow you around the Internet using your search history and other information they have on you. All it does is delete your local browsing history after your session on your device, but does nothing from stopping any website you visit, including Google, from tracking you via your IP address and other tracking mechanisms like browser fingerprinting.
To keep your searches private and out of data profiles, the government, and other legal requests , you need to use DuckDuckGo. For more details, check out our privacy policy. Google tracks you on more than just their search engine. For those, we recommend using private alternatives like DuckDuckGo for search. Yes, you can live Google-free.
A key component of how they have managed to do that is through all these hidden trackers. Google Analytics is installed on most sites, tracking you behind the scenes, letting website owners know who is visiting their sites, but also feeding that information back to Google.
Same for the ads themselves, with Google running three of the largest non-search ad networks installed on millions of sites and apps: Adsense, Admob, and DoubleClick. You know those ads that creepily follow you around everywhere? Most of those are actually run through these Google ad networks, where they let advertisers target you against your search history, browsing history, location history and other personal information they collect. Even less well known is they also enable advertisers like airlines to charge you different prices based upon your personal information.
These ads are not only annoying — they are literally designed to manipulate you through targeting to make you buy more things, and just showing them to you is an act of Google profiting off of your personal information. Our DuckDuckGo browser extension and mobile app is available for all major browsers and devices, and blocks these Google trackers, along with the ones from Facebook and countless other data brokers.
It does even more to protect you as well like providing smarter encryption. That may appear at first blush to be a good thing, but when most people say they want personalization in a search context they actually want localization. They want local weather and restaurants, which can actually be provided without tracking, like we do at DuckDuckGo.
In the aggregate this leads to increased echo chambers that are significantly contributing to our increasingly polarized society. Google is notoriously hard to get a hold of. Search queries generally delivered expected results. Google, Bing, and other popular search engines record the search queries you enter along with other pieces of information. For example, we tend to search for a ton of topics related to our personal lives, for example:.
All this information represents a pot of gold for advertisers. Advertisements are highly targeted to us based on our online activity because it is often highly reflective of our offline activity. Google and affiliate advertisers can create a very accurate profile of how each of us lives and market to us accordingly.
Some people might find it helpful to be served ads on websites, within social media, and in emails that are tailored based on their personal tastes. Indeed, this is the basic premise upon which Google and similar companies justify their intense online tracking.
What is really happening is that you, or your data at least, is a product that can be sold to advertisers or other third parties, whoever is the highest bidder. Many users find this intrusive and even downright creepy. Aside from knowing that someone is compiling a plethora of details about you so they can figure out how best to sell you products and services, there are other implications of targeted advertising.
Here are just a few uncomfortable scenarios:. There are also more serious implications of having your search history exposed through targeted advertising or some other means.
For example, certain people, such as those in abusive relationships or living in oppressed communities, could be put at risk of serious harm. The fact that all of this data is stored somewhere also makes it a target for hackers. For example, in a case, AOL released the search histories of more than , of its users to the public. That server can be in a location of your choice and the IP address will be associated with that location.
Google and any other destination sites will no longer see your real IP address and location, but will instead see that of the VPN. Combining a VPN with incognito or private browsing mode is a pretty safe bet to prevent Google tracking you. That said, there is a small chance Google may still be able to compile a user profile based on other identifiers such as unique browser or device identifiers.
As such, your best form of protection would be to avoid Google altogether, even if you have a VPN. Key features to look out for are a true no-logging policy and protection against information leaks. You can remove that data for the most part by deleting your activity. Even when Google has deleted your data, it still keeps some information. For example, if you delete your search history, the search term will no longer be stored, but the fact that you searched for something at that time will remain logged.
However, Google is vague about how much information is retained. This line is particularly ambiguous:. Sometimes we retain certain information for an extended period of time to meet specific business needs or legal requirements.
The problem is, if you keep using Google, it will continue to store information about you. Select Change setting. In the resulting screen, be sure to uncheck both boxes. The first, if checked, allows Google to track you via Chrome and sites that use Google services. The second allows the company to save recordings of your voice and audio inputs for Google speech services.
Going back to the two boxes on the My Activity page, if you decide to let Google continue recording your activity for whatever reason, you can use the right-hand box to decide how long the company stores it for: 18 months, three months, or until you delete it manually.
Thank you for putting together this very helpful, informative, and action packed data for your readers to be much needed educated with tools to make changes — right away!
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Your Location:. Your Internet Provider:. This information can be used to target ads and monitor your internet usage. It offers outstanding privacy features and is currently available with three months extra free.
Comparitech uses cookies. More info. Menu Close. We are funded by our readers and we may receive a commission when you make purchases using the links on our site. Popular search engines like Google and Bing track your searches and other online activity. We reveal the best private search engines to consider as alternatives.
Sam Woolfe. DuckDuckGo Popular among those concerned with privacy DuckDuckGo is very popular with privacy enthusiasts and is the default search engine in the Tor browser. This search engine does save searches but they are not tied to an individual user: We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. DuckDuckGo and ads DuckDuckGo displays ads for affiliate sites in the right sidebar, which is a little less aggressive than Google, which presents ads at the top of search results.
It earns additional profits from commissions from sites like Amazon and eBay, so you may want to be wary if those pop up a lot in search results: Similarly, we may add an affiliate code to some eCommerce sites e. DuckDuckGo uses your IP address but this is no cause for concern The service came up with expected results for our test search terms, including one search for local services.
Search results based on diversity When deciding which results to display, MetaGer aims to serve users variety. MetaGer temporarily stores your IP address Your IP address is stored along with a timestamp for up to 96 hours four days. Advertising and data collection For the non-targeted advertising component of its model, MetaGer does collect some data. Relevant search results most of the time I tested the search engines with several terms and the results were relevant, except for a local search term which yielded scattered results.
Privacy benefits MetaGer adds an extra layer of privacy by giving you the option to open a web page anonymously. Qwant Qwant is based in France and delivers results in a choice of more than a dozen languages including English, French, and Italian. Issues with local search results Most test searches delivered expected results, but local search results were generally inappropriate. An impressive commitment to privacy This provider never collects any user data, including IP addresses, click behavior, or search history.
Source: Wayback Machine Mojeek does keep some standard logs, including timestamps, webpage, and referral data if applicable , but none of these can be tied to a user. Mojeek offers many setting options You can apply a region filter to your results but options are limited to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the European Union. Searx has an Android app and a Firefox add-on.
Startpage Startpage previously called IXquick is a metasearch engine based in the Netherlands. Startpage outperforms Google It takes its results from Google and delivers them to the user. The short version of its privacy policy reads: Startpage.
Swisscows Swisscows is based in Switzerland and available in eight languages, including English, Italian, and Spanish. A unique way of delivering search results Swisscows differs from other search engines in the way it delivers results.
Swisscows is user friendly The interface is modern and user friendly. What information is Google tracking and why? Why is Google tracking an issue? MetaGer lets you make confidential untraceable searches that leave no footprints.
It also integrates a proxy server so that you can open any link anonymously from the search result pages and yet keep your IP address hidden from the destination server. It also never tracks your keywords. This prohibits third parties or advertisers to target you for ads or any of malicious attacks. Its default language is in German. Gigablast indexes billions of web pages and provides real time info without tracking your online searches or browsing history.
It is considered as one of the best private search engines that keeps you almost entirely hidden to marketers and spammers. Gigablast offers searching with certain customizations and optional parameters like searching by exact phrase, languages, terms, filetypes and many more. Oscobo is an anonymous search engine that allows no tracking of any type.
Like a few of the private search engines here, it lets you search for information, images, videos, news, etc. It also offers a Chrome extension for making searches. Which is your favorite private search engine? Let us know via comments section below. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to enjoy a better experience. Read more: How to completely delete your online search history DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo is one of the most secure search engines that never tracks your searches while providing you an enhanced search experience.
Read more: 10 reasons to give DuckDuckGo a go WolframAlpha WolframAlpha is a computable search engine that provides accurate answers and offers open knowledge. Startpage Startpage works powerfully to provide search results while protecting your searches and avoiding tracking your steps.
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