Search engines: profiling, whose index, and who funds the results
Your searches are some of the most revealing things you type: symptoms, debts, addresses, worries at two in the morning. The engines differ in three ways that matter: whether your searches are kept and tied to you, whose index of the web the results come from, and who pays for it all.
The short answer. If you want your searches kept apart from an ad profile at no cost, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Mojeek, Qwant and Ecosia all say they do not keep or profile your search history. If you are willing to pay, Kagi runs on subscriptions and says user data is only a liability to it. Google is the engine a US court found to hold a search monopoly, kept partly through exclusionary distribution deals; in 2025 the remedy barred exclusive contracts. There is no single best engine: the private ones vary in how complete their results feel, and the most independent ones are the least familiar.
What to compare
| Measure | The question to ask | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Profiling | Are your searches stored and linked to you? | A search history is a detailed map of your life |
| Whose index | Does the engine crawl the web itself or buy results from Bing or Google? | A borrowed index shares the lender's blind spots and its terms |
| Who pays | Ads matched to you, ads matched to the query, subscriptions, or donations? | Funding decides what the engine needs to know about you |
| Result quality | Do you find what you need without going back to your old engine? | An engine you abandon after two days changes nothing |
Weigh what you care about
Profiling. Google's privacy policy lists the terms you search for, and identifiers tied to your browser, app or device, among what it collects. DuckDuckGo says it does not save or share your search history and has no way to link searches to you; its ads are based on the results page you are viewing, so a search for cars shows ads about cars. Brave says its search does not profile you and that it cannot share, sell or lose personal data it never collects. Mojeek says it does no user tracking and replaces your IP address in its logs with a two-letter country code. Qwant says it does not retain your search data. Ecosia says it does not create profiles from your search history and anonymises your IP address after at most 7 days, but its results partners keep IP-linked data longer: Microsoft for 6 months, and Google for 9 months if you agree to Google results.
Whose index. Some engines rent their results. Ecosia's results and ads come from Microsoft Bing, Google or, in France only, EUSP, depending on your location, device and privacy permissions. A few build their own. Brave says its independent index covers over 30 billion pages. Mojeek's results come from its own crawler, MojeekBot, ranked by its own algorithms. Marginalia deliberately surfaces smaller sites that deserve an audience and describes itself as a complement to the big engines, not a replacement. SearXNG is a metasearch engine: it gathers results from other engines.
Who pays. Kagi says its customers pay for the service, calls user data only a liability, and is a Delaware public benefit corporation. It offers a 100-search trial with no card, then 5 US dollars a month for 300 searches or 10 dollars for unlimited searches. Ecosia earns money when people click the ads in its results and says it puts all of its profits into climate action, mainly tree planting. In 2018 it made it legally binding that its shares cannot be sold at a profit and that no profits can be taken out of the company. MetaGer has been run since 2012 by SUMA-EV, a nonprofit association, and members can search without ads. Marginalia is run mainly by one developer, Viktor Lofgren, on donations, grants and API deals, with no investors and bills of about 200 US dollars a month. One ownership fact is easy to miss: Startpage belongs to System1, whose annual report lists it among roughly 40 websites the company owns, alongside MapQuest, and describes using its RAMP platform to direct visitors of those sites to advertisers.
Market power. In September 2025 the US Department of Justice announced remedies after a court found Google a monopolist that used exclusionary agreements to lock up the main routes to search. Google may no longer hold exclusive contracts to distribute Search, Chrome, Google Assistant or the Gemini app, and must share some index and interaction data with certain competitors.
Open code and running it yourself. SearXNG says it stores nothing about its users, does not build a profile, and invites you to run your own copy from its published source. MetaGer published its code under the GNU AGPL in 2016.
If you care most about...
There is no best search engine for everyone. Start from what you most want to change.
| If you care most about | Look at | Why |
|---|---|---|
| No search history tied to you, free | DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Mojeek, Qwant | Each says it does not store or profile your searches |
| Your searches funding something | Ecosia | It says all its profits go to climate action, and none can be taken out |
| An index that does not come from Google or Bing | Brave Search, Mojeek | They crawl the web themselves |
| Paying for search yourself | Kagi | Customers pay, and it calls user data a liability |
| Control of the whole thing | SearXNG | Open source, and you can host your own |
| Finding the small, independent web | Marginalia | Built to surface overlooked sites |
The switch that costs nothing
You do not need to buy anything. Set a different default engine in your browser for a week and keep your old one a click away for the searches where you miss it. If the results work for you, keep it; if not, switching back takes a minute.
What we're not telling you
- Result quality is personal and varies by language and country. We do not measure it; our score for it is a judgement from each engine's own description.
- "Does not profile you" is each company's own statement. We link to it; we cannot audit it.
- AI answer tools and specialist search, such as scholarly or image search, are not compared here.
- We checked these pages in September 2026; policies and prices change.
How we made this
We take no money from any search provider. Every fact above comes from a provider's own pages, a company filing, or a government announcement, linked below. Each engine's scores, with the source behind every cell, are in the search comparison. If something has changed, tell us through Contribute and we will correct it.
Sources
- Google privacy policy, checked 2026-09
- US Department of Justice: remedies against Google (2 September 2025), checked 2026-09
- DuckDuckGo privacy policy, checked 2026-09
- Brave Search, checked 2026-09
- Brave Search API, checked 2026-09
- Mojeek privacy, checked 2026-09
- Why Mojeek, checked 2026-09
- Qwant, checked 2026-09
- Ecosia: IP addresses, checked 2026-09
- Ecosia: search results providers, checked 2026-09
- Ecosia: privacy and your data, checked 2026-09
- Ecosia: trees, not profits (2018), checked 2026-09
- Ecosia: how Ecosia makes money, checked 2026-09
- Kagi privacy, checked 2026-09
- Kagi pricing, checked 2026-09
- MetaGer: about, checked 2026-09
- SearXNG: about, checked 2026-09
- Marginalia Search: about, checked 2026-09
- System1 annual report, Form 10-K for 2024, checked 2026-09