At a time when personal data has become the main driver of the digital economy, the media are increasingly covering the issue of "degoogling". Indeed, we are entitled to ask ourselves what is done with our personal data and how to prevent it from being used by third parties.
Based on this principle, many alternative services to those of Google have emerged on the web. The aim of this series of articles is to offer you some services capable of replacing Google in certain areas, while respecting your personal data.
The first article in this series is therefore devoted to search engine. I will try to select 3 alternative services each time while explaining the benefits and features of these.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo's motto is simple: “Google tracks you, we don’t!”. The duck is a meta-engine, meaning it pulls its results from other search engines. Increasingly popular, the latter does not record your searches and therefore will not offer targeted content like Google can do.
Qwant
Cock-a-doodle-doo! Qwant is a French meta-search engine offering a slightly different interface that highlights different types of content. We will therefore appreciate the fact of seeing the search results in a column depending on whether it is an article, news or a shopping page. As with DuckDuckGo, Qwant ensures that your personal data is not resold or exchanged to third parties.
Searx
The latest is a free project to which you can contribute and which also offers a meta-engine based on the search engines of your choice. The interest of Searx is that you can install it on your own machine (a dedicated server, for example). If you do not have the knowledge or the desire, know that the association Framasoft offers a free instance that can be used directly from their site. If you have to trust a metasearch engine, this is it!
If you know of any other alternatives, please share them! We will cover alternatives to Gmail in the next article.
