Best Privacy-focused Search Engines

Most of the popular search engines collect detailed, personally identifiable information. This information includes the search terms submitted to the search engine, as well as the time, date, and location of the computer submitting the search and is used for marketing and consumer profiling purposes.

Google, the market leader in search engines, automatically collects user search terms and IP addresses. Google admits to retaining identifiable information for 18 months, and then "anonymizes" the data linking search terms to specific IP addresses.

No company is above being hacked and no information stored online is entirely secure. In 2006, AOL, leaked three months' worth of 'aggregated data'. With that in mind here are some useful search engines for those that wish to keep some of their personal interests hidden from marketers, cybercriminals or just keep something for themselves. The two best options:

Ixquick

"Ixquick is strongly committed to protecting the privacy of its user community. This privacy policy details the - very limited and non-personal - information Ixquick.com ("Ixquick") may gather and our disclosure policy."

Ixquick has a 'zero data collection policy - no information on users' IP addresses, browser information, operating system or search words is collected. The search engine claims to only record an aggregate total of how many searches are performed per day:

"We only count the numbers and are in no way able to know what your specific operating system, browser, language settings, etc may be, because we do not record that information."

Ixquick claims not to use identifying cookies and is preconfigured to work with HTTPS. Ixquick offers a free Ixquick proxy service for greater privacy.

Ixquick explains its revenue stream, in lieu of selling user information:

"Ixquick shows a limited amount of relevant sponsored results on the top and the bottom of the results page.
Each time these sponsored results are clicked upon Ixquick receives a minimal fee from the advertiser."

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo advertises itself as the search engine that does not track its users. It claims not to create a profile of its users by providing search results based on the best sources instead of past searches and partnerships with other search engines such as Yandex, Yahoo and Bing.

DuckDuckGo does not save search history as Google does. Nor does it save IP addresses, browser or operating system information. No user Agent strings are collected. DDG refrains from using cookies altogether.

DDG claims to plug the issue of "search leakage" and to use non-personal aggregate information to correct problems, such as spelling errors. DuckDuckGo has an excellent guide on how to escape Google's search "filter bubble".