Google processes 100 billion search requests a month, or about 3.3 billion per day.<\/p>\n
It’s become such a dominant force in web search that its name has become a verb: people don’t “look up something online,” they “google it.”<\/p>\n
But there are other commercial alternatives out there, even beyond Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing.<\/p>\n
Many of them are small and put a premium on anonymity and data security. DUCKDUCKGO: This search engine, which sets itself apart with a duck logo, has been around since 2008.<\/p>\n
It claims that it does not store data such as a user’s IP address. Nor does it send information about a web search on to other websites, for instance when a user clicks on a link related to a search.<\/p>\n
After revelations about US online snooping by fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden, DuckDuckGo saw a dramatic increase in user numbers, with the number of search requests surging by a factor of two and a half.<\/p>\n
In February, it saw an average daily rate of 4.5 million search requests. DuckDuckGo bases its search results on data from competitors, like Yahoo, and results from its own web crawler. IXQUICK: Ixquick also touts the fact that it does not store its users’ IP addresses, send personal data on to third parties or leave cookies behind in browsers.<\/p>\n
Based in the Netherlands, Ixquick pulls together its results by searching multiple search engines simultaneously.<\/p>\n
Since 2009, it has operated STARTPAGE, which works by making anonymous requests on Google.<\/p>\n
Startpage processes about 5.2 million requests per day and has also seen an increase in user requests since the Snowden revelations. QWANT: This France-based engine went online in 2013 and drew about 600 million requests that year.<\/p>\n
Its focus is on privacy and security, but also providing users with an unfiltered view of the world.<\/p>\n
Services like Google, it argues, shape their results based on users’ location and past requests.<\/p>\n
Qwant says it has no such filters, meaning requests pull up information from all over the world based on relevance, not on the users’ profile.<\/p>\n
It says it will install a cookie on a browser for a search, but that it does not store information for the long term.<\/p>\n
People who visit the website also get to view a cross-section of trending information pulled from services like Twitter and Wikipedia, as well as from news websites. Other entrants could still show up.<\/p>\n
European authorities have tried to create their own counterweight to Google for years, but without much success so far.<\/p>\n
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