A large portion of Best Security Search is devoted to the removal of malicious search engines and browser hijackers. These sites are after your personal information. To get it, they’ll do anything they can get away with. Luckily there are ways to avoid this.
First, we must explain the reason behind the heavily competitive search engine arena. What makes the branch so lucrative that many firms are willing to employ so many unethical practices to get ahead?
There’s a lot of money in the Internet advertising business. Google, the undisputed master of web searching, is one of the biggest companies on the planet. They hold the largest share of the Internet searches. Even a small piece of that pie is worth a lot.
Basics of Data Collection
Data collection is a simple in theory and powerful in practice. When you receive content from the websites you visit, they receive content from you, even without your knowledge. Virtually all sites do this, but most sites do it more than others.
Search engines can get your:
- IP address, the most trackable web data.
- Location.
- Searches history and tracking of your sessions.
The best security search engine would be one that avoided collecting that information and had a strong protection again external threats.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is the most obvious and popular choice for a private search engine. DDG doesn’t collect any information on its users, including the IP address. This is the default search engine of the Tor network. While this is a decent choice, there are several notable criticisms of the search engine.
The most notable criticism is the security of the organization. DuckDuckGo shares its servers with the Amazon company. Considering the latter’s shady privacy record, off-the-record data collection may be occurring on the site.
Other than that, DuckDuckGo is still much more privacy-friendly than the mainstream engines of Google, Bing, or Yahoo Search.
Google (kind of)
This may seem a bit paradoxical, as it seems like the nice people at Google wouldn’t mind knowing the length and girth of your pubic hairs. But we’re not talking about using Google directly. There are sites that display Google search results, effectively searching Google for you, so the site can’t collect your personal data.
Many browser hijackers utilize this method, but we’re not here to talk about them. Sites like:
…use the same method, minus the data collection. The added downside of skipping Google is the fact of redirection. The site must “Google” things on its own, collect all the data, and then send it back to you. This understandably slows down the process, but if you want to use Google in a more private way, Startpage and sites like it are a good option.
Search Engines From Other Countries
The Google alternative of Russia and China aren’t any less intrusive to your privacy, but the comrades from these states don’t have that much use for your personal data. It’s pointless to target ads in territories where they aren’t for sale. Your privacy will get violated, but at least the violator won’t be willing to send his annoying ads in your territory.
Go To The Library
Yes, that is also a good alternative. No sleazy advertising agent would try to go through your read-list, as most of them can’t read. You’ll also be exposed to a lot of valuable information minus all of the useless content on the Internet. And let’s be honest, most of the search results we’re getting are just a part of an advertising narrative, search engine optimization (SEO), sponsored links, and brainwashing.
Search engines are an insanely useful tool. The privacy issues are arising from advertisers and the government, as they are hungry to data.
