Qwant

If you live in the Western world, Google dominates the internet, search included. There's a huge amount wrong with Google, from its compliance with totalitarian censorship, to the fact it profits at the expense of users' privacy, its tax-avoidance, filter bubbling, and much, much else besides. I hate to point out the obvious at this point, but you'll notice that genuinely all of these directly affect important aspects of democracy. Sorry: That's not me, it's just that information, taxes and privacy are inherently at the core of democracy.

Qwant is a comparatively new search engine which promises not to leverage your privacy to profit. It doesn't - as Google does - compile your searches, catalogue your interests, cross-reference your website visits (to say nothing of email contents, youtube views, bookmarks, contacts, phone apps and everything you've done on Chrome). Nor does Qwant leverage all this information to build up a profile of you as an individual, as Google does. Nor does it use that information for its own profit. You might remind yourself of historical examples where an organization has compiled profiles of individuals for its own benefit. And how those organizations related to democracy.

For going against that trend Qwant deserves a modicum of merit, wouldn't you agree?

So what should I say? That its search is better than Google's? No. But it's near-equal. Damn-near equal. So what price your privacy? What price do you put on the freedom to search, to not be bubbled, to not be profiled as a matter of routine?

And if you don't like Qwant, let me break it to you gently: Bing (see here) and Yahoo search (see here) will not help. Privacy conscious alternatives are:

• Startpage (looks crappy, but searches well... and that's because it proxies your requests to Google. Google results, no privacy violation.)
• DuckDuckGo (a privacy-respecting search engine. Read more here.)
• SearX (a meta search-engine: it gathers results from other search engines and present it to you without revealing to them what you're asking)
• Disconnect.me (another way of getting results without revealing who you are)

One more thing: If privacy considerations of this sort are new to you, know that many alternatives exist to the convenience you've been sold by Google. It just takes time to research them and learn why it's important. You can do worse than by starting with www.privacytools.io and advice from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a US non-profit organization advising the public). Don't go thinking that Chrome and Facebook are necessities (or even desirable). You don't have to have every thought and message catalogued by Gmail for their benefit. Ask yourself why things you use are "free". (The answer is because they are using you, in case you're in doubt.)

claims to be independent but is bing, claims to be private but has tracking links on the homepage, not impressed