What is the best Search Engine?

by Shane Zentz

There has been a lot of debate lately about the NSA spying on all citizens and the collection of data of ordinary people, and one dimension of that debate is the internet. Specifically, internet Search engines. It’s so obvious that most search engines track your searches. If you don’t believe it, just try this: go to google and search for ‘lawn mower repair your city’, and replace ‘your city’ with the city or geographic area that you live in, and press enter. Now to see if this search is tracked, visit a few websites (maybe 10 or so) such as facebook, before you know it you will see ads that are totally related to ‘lawn mower repair ‘your city” and this is no accident, it is just simple data collection and utilization. This bothers some and does not bother others. For me, I think that it is a little creepy, but I see the point of it, it is how google, bing, facebook, and others make their money, but it is still a little bothersome.

So recently I learned of a new search engine that promises not to track searches and ip addresses, but still gives you the quality of google searches. The search engine is called startpage.com and is based in the netherlands. If you read through the search engines documentation and claims you will see that they take your search term and submit it anonymously to google and return genuine google search results to you, without the creepy tracking of google or others. It sounds like a great idea to me, so recently I have started to utilize this search engine more and more, to the point that I use it as my default over google and others like duckduckgo.com (which also promises more privacy but delivers a little less quality results than google imo). So for me the best search engine is clear, it is google, but if you want google quality results without the tracking and data collection, switch to startpage.com for google quality searches without the google tracking and privacy invasion.

Thanks for reading this article,

Shane Zentz