How to make your web searches more secure and private

You’ll also see drop-down menus above your search results that let you filter them by location and time. Depending on the keywords you used, you may also see a Local results tab — this will temporarily use your IP address to find regional site results, but this IP address is not logged. As soon as you close the Brave search tab, everything is forgotten.

DuckDuckGo Search

DuckDuckGo has been around much longer than the Brave search engine, so it has more features and options. Its purpose is the same: to help you search the web privately, without your queries being logged. It pulls data from hundreds of different sources, including the Microsoft Bing search engine and Apple Maps.

As with the Brave search engine, your searches are never saved or saved – every time you show up on the DuckDuckGo portal, you are considered a new user. You will notice some advertising next to the search results you get through DuckDuckGo, but those adverts are not targeted and the ad networks behind them know nothing about you.

“Our privacy policy is simple: we don’t collect or share any of your personal information,” says DuckDuckGo, which also develops a browser extension and mobile apps for Android and iOS. You don’t need to create an account with the service, and you won’t find any history of your searches in DuckDuckGo, making it impossible for the company to monetize them. The portal now processes around 80 million searches per day.

DuckDuckGo is very easy to use – just type your query in the main search box and hit the enter key to get started. For some queries, like celebrity names or places that can be found on a map, you may see pop-ups next to your top search results. For thematic searches, some recent updates may also be included.

At the top of the search results list, you’ll see ways to filter the matches you see. You can focus on Pictures, Videos, New, Plans, or Purchases for example, as well as setting filters based on where or when a page was last updated. Use the Settings on the right to change the look of the results page and to change various other DuckDuckGo options.

Limit Google

It should be borne in mind that if you are using Google Chrome and are signed in to Google, you may very well sync your DuckDuckGo or Brave searches with your Google account. Your Google web history and Chrome browsing history (if you’re signed in to Google) will match most of the time, because Google syncs them by default, in part to make it easier to use Google on multiple devices.