If you don’t want your data to be collected while surfing the Internet, you have to look for other search engines. They also work well – sometimes even with artificial intelligence.
When you search the internet, you usually do it with Google. According to the web traffic analysis service Statcounter, the market share of the search engine in Germany is stable at a good 90 percent. “Apart from that, only Bing from Microsoft has some relevance with around 5.5 percent, but this is certainly due to the integration into Windows,” says Jörg Geiger from the specialist magazine “Chip”. But both Google and Bing are search engines that diligently collect and use the data of their users.
In addition to targeted advertising, this is also noticeable in the search results: “The search results for one and the same term can be quite different with these search engines, depending on who is searching,” explains Wolfgang Stieler from the “Technology Review”. Because the algorithms of Google and Bing also take into account the surfing behavior of the user in the search results.
Common browsers are not anonymous
In principle, search engines all work in a similar way. Small programs called crawlers comb through the web, analyzing and indexing the content of websites. The search providers can then access this search index for search queries and display suitable hit lists.
What matters is which hits are at the top. Because let’s be honest, who still bothers to sift through pages two to ten on Google for the desired answer. According to Stieler, the Google ranking is mainly based on how often a website is linked by others, plus factors such as keywords, location or relevance. How long the searcher stays on the website is also a signal as to whether the content of the page provides the right question about the search intention. Google’s large group of users and the resulting network effect are part of the secret of its success. Because the more users click on a specific page for a topic, the more relevant it becomes for the search results.
But there are alternatives to Google such as home page. “The site basically uses a trick, because it forwards search queries to Google anonymously, so the search results themselves are very good,” explains Jörg Geiger. The search engines delivered similarly good results in the test Duckduckgo and qwant. The big advantage is: “The users are not tracked here.”
And then there are the meta search engines as alternatives. They bundle the hits from various search providers and list the pages from which the search hits come. A well-known provider is metager. Behind it is a non-profit association from Germany with servers in Germany. “Data protection is lived here, but old familiar sources are used, such as Bing, Yandex or Yahoo,” says Geiger. Another meta search engine with many sources is something like “Etools.ch“.
According to Geiger, technically experienced users could also access the offer of “Searx.info” To fall back on. “This is also a meta search engine, but you can set which search engines you want to tap into.” So the alternatives to Google are there, but they are rarely used. According to Wolfgang Stieler, this is also due to convenience: “Google is the default search engine in many browsers and only very few users bother to select another provider in the menu.”
Log off first, then surf anonymously
If you want to quench Google’s thirst for data, you can change the search engine settings in your Google account. The “Web & App Activities” function can be deactivated there, explains André Hesel from “Computer Bild”: “This prevents certain activities such as searches and page history from being stored in the Google account at all.”
Even better: At least on notebooks or PCs, don’t surf with a registered Google account. Before searching, check “Google.de” in the top right-hand corner to see whether you are logged in and log out if necessary.
User search behavior could also change with new technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently on everyone’s lips, especially language models with chatbots like “ChatGPT”. Not only Microsoft has turned it into an AI search for Bing. The US start-up Neeva has also developed a search engine offering from “ChatGPT”.
AI search is practical, but far from reliable
The Neeva offering searches pages with voice commands and then creates short or long text documents for the user. This can be interesting, for example, for an overview of various book or film reviews. “The AI then reads through ten reviews and creates a summary of how a book or film is rated,” explains Stieler.
Incidentally, Neeva also does not use tracking and is ad-free. The search engine provider also charges its users a subscription fee of just under five euros per month for this.
Jörg Geiger also sees AI chatbots as a breath of fresh air for the search engine market, but the technology is far from mature: “Somehow sources have to be weighted and fact checks have to take place,” says Geiger. Because AI searches did deliver individual answers, but sometimes also freely invented ones.