You can use it with an email address, a phone number or just nothing. Chats are end to end encrypted but it is not great for keeping meta data private.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application types
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Android
- iPhone
- Android Tablet
- iPad
- Snapcraft
- Flathub
- F-Droid































































































Comments
It's sad that both
Qwant and
Ecosia are totally dependent over
Microsoft Bing .
Qwant had some very concerning data sharing with the american giant and got sanctionned from the CNIL, that's why I stopped recommend it to people.
You didn't mentioned
Startpage that is great but totally depedent from
Google Search .
There is
Mojeek that is independant but it's from the UK and not that great from my personnal experience.
Also
Swisscows is independant however I think it's only for the german index. But it's based in Switzerland and also not amazing results.
MetaGer is both independant and in the EU (Germany) and the code is published under the copyleft AGPLv3 licence, however you now have to pay to use it and it wasn't incredible either.
Murena host and maintained a fork of
Searx in France called
Spot Search Engine but this is still depedent over mainstream search engines. Like every
Searx or
SearXNG instances hosted in the UE (or not). Murena also provide
Murena Find which seems to be a frontend or a proxy for
Qwant which is a meta-searchengine using
Microsoft Bing as said before... Maybe it would improve privacy but Murena (previously /e/foundation) had security breaches in the past which doesn't inspire enough trust from me to recommend them either... Maybe I'm over-paranoid though.
Anyway, the European Union has poor search engine indexes or uses american indexes... They had Tailcat but it has been aquired by an american company to become
Brave Search and honestly it's probably the best experience from a privacy oriented independant search engine (I don't fully trust brave though) so they probably lost a gem...
Let's hope one of their index will improve massively by the end of the decade.
I just saw that
Spot Search Engine fork is now based over
SearXNG