Introduction
It is a well-known fact that Google is, by far, the biggest search engine on the internet. Over the years, however, Google has been criticized for political censorship (<- WSJ archive) and encroaching on people's privacy. The privacy issues have gotten so bad that District Judge Lucy Koh has ruled that the $5 billion class-action lawsuit against Google's incognito web tracking can go forward.
Enter the multiple Google alternatives, each of which purports to respect and protect the user's privacy. There are DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and StartPage along with the lesser known search engines like MetaGer, Searx, and Mojeek. Some are centralized and proprietary; others are decentralized and open-source. In this post, I will go over the backgrounds and features of each search engine, and show where PRESEARCH falls in the spectrum.
But What Makes A Privacy-Friendly Search Engine Privacy-Friendly?
To best answer this question, one needs to learn how big search engines like Google are not privacy-friendly. When you search on Google, the company collects your data such as your IP address, unique identifier, and search queries. Then, Google will sell your private data to advertising companies who will bombard you with targeted ads. You are effectively the product.
Privacy-focused search engines are the exact opposite. They do not set up trackers; they do not save your search history; and they do not store any identifying information.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a US-based search engine that generates search results from many sources, including Wikipedia, Bing, Yandex, and WolframAlpha. It also features its own web crawler called the DuckDuckBot. Something that may give privacy-focused users pause is that DuckDuckGo does save your search history, as stated in its privacy policy. It states that the company will save your search history to improve aspects like misspellings, but not personal information.
Something to also keep in mind is that DuckDuckGo is based in the US and therefore, is under the US government's jurisdiction. The US government is infamous for its surveillance programs. PRISM, especially, is relevant as it requires private tech companies to share information with the government.
Qwant
Qwant is a Franch-based search engine that primarily sources results from Bing. As it is based in Europe, it does not fall under the US jurisdiction and thus, not subject to the US government's surveillance programs. According to its privacy policy, the company will not set any advertising cookies, save your search history, and create an advertising profile. Any data shared with 3rd parties are pseudonymized.
Startpage
Startpage is based in the Netherlands, meaning just like Qwant, it does not fall under American jurisdiction. In its privacy policy, it states that Startpage will not record your IP address, track your activity, and save your search queries.
There may be an issue with the fact that US company, Privacy One, acquired a majority stake on Startpage in October 2019. Privacy One's parent company is System1. On record, co-founder Michael Blend has said the following:
“Our philosophy,” Blend explains, “is that someone may want a product or service but has not yet done a formal search … we call that latent intent, intent that has not yet been demonstrated … we identify that in consumers based on a large variety of proprietary data.”
“In our business,” Blend adds, “if we can gather as much data as possible, give it off to our engineers and data scientists, and then manage the two effectively, the business can quickly scale.”
To be fair, Startpage did publish an article stating that the founders "may unilaterally reject any potential technical change that could negatively affect user privacy".
MetaGer
This is the first search engine of this list that is open-source. You can check out the project on GitLab and if you want to contribute, you can. With its infrastructure based in Germany, MetaGer is a metasearch engine that takes results from Bing, Yandex, and others along with its own web crawler. MetaGer does not do any tracking and anonymizes your search queries.
Some nice features MetaGer provides are its transparency with the source of each search result and the option to open a new page anonymously:
SearX
Like with MegaGer, SearX is another open-source metasearch engine. You can research the project on GitHub if you are curious. On its "About" page, it states that SearX will not store any personal data nor will it share any information with 3rd parties.
What makes SearX different from MetaGer, however, are its instances and the option for anyone to set up their own instance. The advantage of running your own private instance is that you have full control over the source code, logging settings, and private data. As you are not using a public instance, you will not be at mercy to an unknown instance administrator.
Mojeek
Based in the UK, Mojeek is unlike the other 5 search engines in that it is not a metasearch engine. It is a true search engine with its own crawler and index. In 2018, Mojeek claimed to have indexed over 2 billion pages. Under its privacy policy, Mojeek states that it does not place cookies on your computer and implement specific user tracking. It does collect data, but the data are non-personal and will only be used to improve search results.
Where Does Presearch Fall Under The Privacy Spectrum?
Presearch is very similar to MetaGer and SearX in that they are all open-source. According to its privacy policy, Presearch will not save your search queries, use third party cookies, track your location, and use trackers. Presearch does collect some information from the user such as your email address, password (encrypted), language information, and others.
Similar to SearX's instances, Presearch has what are called nodes. Recently launched at the end of January 2021, users can run their own node to contribute to Presearch's mission to decentralization. To cite Page 33 of its Vision Paper, nodes are search "workers" that connect to the Node Gateway and perform search operations. Each node is required to have a uniquely public-facing IP address which sounds a little risky. But the Node Gateway removes personally identifiable information. At this time, the search engine is still centralized, but the hope is that once the node network is robust and secure, it can make the full transition.
What really differentiates Presearch from all the other search engines is the cyptocurrency rewards via the PRE token. If you make an account (referral link), you can earn a bit of a PRE for each search. If you earn enough PRE, you can withdraw it to a wallet like Metamask.
However, you can use your PRE token for other purposes, notably keyword staking and node staking. In the former, you can stake your tokens against a certain keyword and create an ad to the website of your choice. For the latter, if you have at least 1000 PRE, you can stake your tokens on your node and earn more PRE that way.
