Find an ethical search engine that isn't Google. Ethical and environmental rankings of 12 search engines with recommended buys and what to avoid.
The guide looks at issues of digital privacy, adverts and algorithms, and how search engine companies make money out of your data.
It also looks at which search engines use AI-generated results as default and which you can use if you want to avoid AI.
The guide rates brands on ethical factors such as privacy, workers rights, tax policies, military involvement and more.
Changing your search engine from some of the biggest tech monopolies to brands who place more emphasis on your privacy is one of the easiest ethical switches you can make. Your data no longer becomes a financial product for advertising and surveillance.
This is a shopping guide from Ethical Consumer, the UK's leading alternative consumer organisation. Since 1989 we've been researching and recording the social and environmental records of companies, and making the results available to you in a simple format.
| Brand Name of the company | Score (out of 100) | Ratings Categories Explore related ratings in detail | |
|---|---|---|---|
Brand XCompany Profile: Brand X ltd |
90
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Brand YCompany Profile: Brand Y ltd |
33
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In addition to the score table, subscribers can see which companies we recommend as Best Buys, which companies to avoid, and why.
What to look for when choosing a search engine:
Does it have its own index? Go for a search engine that has built or is building its own index and doesn’t rely on Google and Microsoft.
Is it taking action on the climate? The search engine sector is not transparent about its climate impacts. Look for companies who are addressing their use of energy.
What to avoid when choosing a search engine:
Does it supply the military? Big Tech companies are increasingly providing services to the military and facilitating wars. Opt for those who steer clear of this.
Is it a default search engine? Most browsers will have Google or Bing as their default. Use the browser settings to change to an alternative.
Is it a US Big Tech firm? A few massive corporations control far too much of the Internet. Choose a search engine that challenges their market dominance.
In addition to the score table, subscribers can see which companies we recommend as Best Buys, which companies to avoid, and why.
Search engines are what make the web a navigable and useful source of knowledge. Without them, the web – with its billions of sites and its vast quantities and varying qualities of information – would be like an immense library with no catalogue and no librarians.
Google dominates but there are a surprising number of smaller alternatives and in this guide we take a closer look at their ethical credentials.
Google, obviously. The brand-cum-verb has about 90% of worldwide search engine market share and processes an average of 5.9 million searches a minute. Its parent company Alphabet has other products such as YouTube and cloud computing but its largest revenue stream is still from advertising on Google’s search engine.
We’ve also included Google’s nearest competitors: Microsoft’s Bing, which has 5% market share, and Yahoo! which has 1.5% market share and is owned by US private equity company Apollo.
As well as these familiar names, we’ve included the tree-planting search engine Ecosia and privacy-focused alternatives Brave, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Mojeek, Qwant, as well as Startpage, Dogpile and 1.org.
Given Google’s collection and use of our personal data, the main ethical focus of most of the alternative search engines is protecting our privacy. We rated them on how well they do this and you can see how below.
Other search engines define ethics differently. For example, Ecosia focuses on climate and the environment and 1.org on charitable giving.
Search engine companies operate in many spheres so we rated them in all our usual ethical categories such as tax conduct and Israel-Palestine, and we also created a bespoke rating investigating their links to the military.
When we type a query into a search engine, it looks through its index to find relevant websites. It has created this index using web crawlers (a type of automated software) which it sends out across the web to read and store information about websites. For each website, it saves the address plus details about the content and matches this information to our search queries to present us with relevant results. Search engines rank the pages they have found using algorithms and the highest ranked sites appear higher up on our results page.
Search engines that use profiling (such as Google and Bing) will rank sites that are personally relevant to us higher up, for example they will prioritise shops in our area. Almost all search engines will also include adverts at the top of the page and sometimes further down the page.
The algorithms used to rank search results are complex and not very transparent. They analyse factors such as relevance, quality, authority (judged by how many reputable sites link to that page), user experience, and location.
Google uses more than 200 criteria, but it doesn’t publish the complete list or the weighting given to each.
This lack of transparency means that we don’t know what results are being excluded, or why we’re being presented with one set of results when someone else could conduct the same search and receive a different set of results.
All the search engines in this guide generate income from advertising, apart from Kagi which is a subscription service and has no adverts.
Google, Bing, and Yahoo use personalised ads. These are adverts which are targeted to the profile of the user. The profile is created using data collected from the user’s online activity.
Dogpile and 1.org also appear to use personalised ads according to their privacy policies.
Brave, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Mojeek, Startpage, and Qwant use contextual ads. These are adverts that are based on the user’s search terms and don’t involve any personalisation.
Brave also has a subscription option which gives ad-free results and Mojeek says its main source of income is from selling its search service to other websites.
Many people find ads very annoying.
To get rid of them you can install free ad blockers to your web browser. Look in the settings function of your browser and search for programmes like AdBlock Plus, Ghostery, Privacy Badger, and UBlock Origin.
One small downside of ad blockers is that they block adverts on all websites including those of organisations that you may support and which rely on advertising for a bit of income. On such sites you might see a pop-up box which asks you to consider allowing ads for this reason. Ad blockers can generally be disabled temporarily or allow you to create exceptions so that you can see ads on certain sites of your choosing. This means you can browse ad-free while still supporting organisations that depend on advertising.
Full online access to our unique shopping guides, ethical rankings and company profiles. The essential ethical print magazine.
We rated companies on their overall approach to digital privacy and on specific criteria for each tech service e.g social media, search engines.
Companies were rated on important digital privacy issues such as:
For search engine companies specifically, we also looked at whether they stored user search histories or used targeted marketing.
Some search engine companies scored well for digital privacy.
Digital privacy rating of 80 or above (out of 100)
Brave scored 80 as it did use some targeted marketing but had good privacy features on its browser.
DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and Mojeek did not store user search histories or used targeted marketing so they scored 90.
Middle scoring brands on digital privacy
Several brands scored between 40 and 60 for digital privacy. These were:
Startpage used targeted marketing and scored 60.
Qwant scored 50 because of its use of personalised search results.
Ecosia scored 40 because it logged user data and provided personalised search results.
Worst search engine companies for digital privacy
Bing (Microsoft) and Google failed to score any points for digital privacy.
Only marginally better were Yahoo! (scored 10), and 1.org and Dogpile (both System1, scored 20).
Mojeek was founded by Marc Smith, who released the first version of the search engine from his bedroom in 2004.
After noticing that users were searching for sensitive medical information, Smith introduced a no-tracking privacy policy which, according to the company, made Mojeek the first search engine in the world to do so.
In the last couple of years, the adverts at the top of our results pages have been increasingly displaced by AI summaries, supposedly providing the answer to your search question.
These summaries are often inaccurate and require much more water and energy than traditional searches. They also mean that fewer people click through to websites, thus threatening the income of publishers (like Ethical Consumer).
So, you might want to choose a search engine that allows you to avoid them.
At the time of writing, the following search engines did not have AI summaries:
All of these are owned by System1.
With Kagi and Mojeek, AI summaries appear only when you request them.
Yahoo is rolling out its AI answer engine but at the moment has only done so in the US.
The following search engines currently allow you to turn off AI summaries through their settings:
Google doesn’t let you turn them off (although there are some workarounds like adding -AI after your search query) and for Bing, we tried but couldn't find any way to get rid of them.
To read more about some of the other problems being caused by the AI gold rush, see our guide to AI chatbots and large language models.
Whether it’s Gmail, Maps, an Android phone, or YouTube, most of us use Google products every day. The company is less than 30 years old but it’s almost impossible to imagine life without it.
And given its ease of use, many people would probably question why they need to.
In this guide, we explore several ethical reasons for avoiding Google where possible. But one issue that affects us all personally is the company’s massive collection and exploitation of personal data. Google harvests vast amounts of information about its users across all its products and beyond.
This includes searches, location history, online purchases and more.
With this information it infers detailed characteristics about us to create individual profiles and predict our interests and behaviour. It monetises this information by selling targeted advertising space to advertisers based on these profiles.
The impact of this can't be overstated. In a 2019 report on Google and Facebook, Amnesty International outlined the dangers of corporate surveillance and the harmful effects of profiling: “Put simply, surveillance on such a scale represents an unprecedented interference with the right to privacy, that cannot be compatible with the companies’ responsibility to respect human rights. This goes beyond an intrusion into every aspect of our lives online, and in fact threatens our right to shape and define who we are as autonomous individuals in society.”
Some people accept this level of intrusion in return for the convenience of Google’s services. But many don’t and are looking for alternatives.
No, most of them don’t. Creating an index for the whole Internet is a massive and complex task. Because of this, most search engine companies pay Google or Bing (Microsoft) to use their indexes. This means that even if you’ve chosen to avoid the Big Tech companies, you may still be using them anyway.
Two companies in this guide, Brave and Mojeek, have developed their own indexes and so don’t rely on Google or Bing for their search engines. We awarded them extra points in our Company Ethos rating for providing this alternative to Big Tech.
Two other companies, Ecosia and Qwant, are collaborating to develop a new index called European Search Perspective which focuses on French and German language results. This is already partially in use by both companies but many Ecosia results are provided by Google and Bing, and Qwant also relies partially on
Bing.
Yahoo and DuckDuckGo use Bing but DuckDuckGo is currently building its own index.
Startpage and Dogpile use Google and Bing. We couldn’t find information about 1.org’s index but it’s owned by the same company as Startpage and Dogpile and almost certainly uses Google or Bing.
Kagi isn’t explicit about all its sources but says that it uses “all major search providers worldwide” so it’s likely it uses Google.
This widespread reliance on the indexes of Google and Microsoft Bing may make you question whether it’s worth switching to an alternative search engine.
But we think it is because every person that does so makes a small dent in Big Tech’s monopoly.
All the smaller search engines scored much more than Google and Microsoft in our Digital Privacy rating as none of them collect and exploit personal data in the same way as the tech giants.
This probably depends on what you’re searching for. The search engines that rely on Google and Bing will give you similar results because they’re drawing on the same indexes.
Brave and Mojeek have their own indexes and so may return different results which some people will find helpful. But they’re smaller than those of the big companies and this may mean you get fewer relevant results for some searches.
However, this may not reduce their usefulness and you might consider it an acceptable trade-off for the increased privacy and the non-personalised results.
The best approach is probably to experiment with several search engines to see which works best for you. And, as we mentioned in our section on bias, it’s good practice to use more than one search engine, particularly for research or information on controversial topics.
All web browsers have a default search engine and, in most cases, this will be Google or Bing (see our forthcoming separate guide to browsers).
This means we’re often using these search engines unknowingly, especially on our smartphones.
You can switch your default search engine to an alternative in your browser’s settings. Most browsers offer a list of alternatives (DuckDuckGo is quite a common one).
If your preferred option isn't listed in the standard alternatives, search for the one you want and then save it as the default search engine, and/or save the web address in your bookmarks, or you could set it as your browser home page.
Search queries and their results have been shown to reflect and perpetuate discriminatory attitudes. In her 2018 book Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble found that searching for the term “black girls” on Google returned porn sites and discussions about why black women are so angry, and that results for a search of the word “Jew” included a significant number of antisemitic pages.
In 2023 researchers found algorithmic bias in the search engine autocomplete function consistent with long-standing societal discrimination relating to characteristics of gender, race, and sexual orientation.
Studies into searches on polarising topics such as the Israel-Palestine conflict or LGBTIQ+ issues show that results vary depending on the search engine used and factors such as language, location, and previous searches. This has the potential to reinforce existing opinions and polarise views.
Given Google’s size and market share, its power to shape our views is troubling, however, the issues described above affect all search engines so simply switching may not be the answer.
To reduce bias and expose ourselves to a variety of views, at least when researching contentious topics, it’s good to get into the habit of using multiple search engines and search terms, using neutral language, avoiding leading questions, and reading beyond the first page of results.
Bing is available in China but is subject to strict censorship of certain search terms. According to a Bloomberg report based on testimony from Microsoft employees, censored terms include human rights, Dalai Lama, and Tiananmen Square. Microsoft management states that it’s just complying with the law and the alternative would be to leave the market which would result in cutting people off from information they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
However, a study by the University of Toronto Citizen Lab, which compared the operation of censorship by Microsoft Bing and seven other search engines, found that Bing’s political censorship rules were broader and affected more search results than those of its main Chinese competitor Baidu. It also found that, on average, Bing restricted displaying search results from a greater number of website domains than Baidu. The report concluded that its findings suggest that non-Chinese technology companies are no more capable of resisting censorship demands than their Chinese counterparts.
Google has also been criticised for enabling censorship by many governments, including authoritarian regimes. According to the Observer, the company has cooperated with around 150 countries that want information removed from their public domains and has removed millions of items of content.
In the four years to June 2024, Russia accounted for more than 60% of takedown requests and the company has complied with multiple requests to remove content critical of the Russian state such as YouTube videos calling for protests against Vladimir Putin’s government. The same article noted how the company has also cooperated with the Afghanistan police in the years since the country was recaptured by the Taliban but it has not made public the content it had removed.
We’re used to considering our carbon footprints for activities such as travel or buying stuff that comes from far away but less so for our online activity.
But every time we search the web, data is transmitted to and from data centres. Data centres and data transmission networks are estimated to account for 1% of energy-related GHG emissions.
According to the International Energy Agency, these need to halve by 2030 to be on track for Net Zero by 2050. So, we would hope to see search engine companies reporting their emissions and taking significant steps to reduce them but on the whole they weren’t.
We rated the search engines for the climate policies and actions to find an eco-friendly search engine.
Neither Google nor Microsoft had adequate targets and their emissions have increased over the last five years so they scored 0 in our climate rating.
Ecosia scored 70 because we considered it to be a company wholly focused on providing a low-carbon alternative as it has built its own solar plants and produces twice as much renewable energy as needed to power all searches on Ecosia. However, its emissions reporting was incomplete and could be much more transparent.
Mojeek scored 50 because it discussed the impact of its data centres and used a data centre provider that sourced 100% renewable energy.
The smaller, alternative search engine companies did very little emissions reporting but most scored 40 (out of 100) for the climate rating because their impact is likely to be relatively low due to their size and the fact they don’t make any physical products.
Ecosia is a German company that gives 100% of its profits to environmental causes, principally planting trees. At the time of writing, it says it has planted 231 million trees in over 40 countries. It publishes a monthly report showing its income and how it has spent it.
Its income is generated by the adverts that accompany its search results. These are provided by Microsoft who pay Ecosia a share of the profit from the ads.
Profits are only generated if you click on an ad, not from simply using the search engine.
We developed a new rating to score tech companies on their links to the military.
Under this new military and tech rating, Google and Microsoft scored 0 (out of 100).
Both companies were found to have contracts worth billions of dollars to supply the US Department of Defense.
We didn’t find any direct military links for the other search engine companies in this guide. However, apart from Mojeek they all relied on Google or Microsoft to provide a significant element of their business. In most cases this was the search index and, in the case of Brave, it was Google’s Chromium browser. Because of these indirect links to the military, these companies scored 60.
Mojeek was the only company to score 80 as it was not found to have any links to the military but did not have a policy explicitly excluding such a connection.
Google and Microsoft scored 0 under our Israel-Palestine rating, as they are both BDS targets due to their significant links with the Israeli government and provision of services to the Israeli military.
System1 (Dogpile, 1.org, Startpage) scored 50 as it stated that it had operations in Israel, and Yahoo! owner Apollo scored 60 because of its partnership with an Israeli finance company.
The companies that relied on Google and Microsoft for their search index or browser scored 70, while Mojeek, which had no such links, scored 80.
Every search uses energy and, if it’s on Google or Bing, it gives away your personal data too. So why not try and reduce how much you search?
Many people use Google to search for sites that they already know and regularly use, for example typing in the name of their bank to find the home page. Instead of this you can use the bookmark function of your web browser for pages you visit regularly. This means you can go directly to the web page you want rather than using a search engine.
If you have a lot of saved web pages there are other methods for storing and accessing your favourite sites in addition to the bookmark function.
One way is to use websites which provide dashboard templates or “start pages” where you can group websites under different categories such as finance, shopping, or entertainment. There are several free options available and once you’ve created your own dashboard with all your links, you can set it as your browser home page if you wish.
The analogue alternative to searching is to use other sources of information, such as looking things up in books or in the library, or asking friends and neighbours. Plus sometimes not knowing a thing is OK too!
Only three companies scored 100 for tax conduct. These were Ecosia, Mojeek, and Qwant.
The rest scored 0.
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo’s owner Apollo Global Management had subsidiaries in tax havens.
Brave, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and System1 (which owns 1.org, Dogpile, and Startpage) were all incorporated in the tax-break state of Delaware.
Here are replies to typical questions that people ask about search engines.
Should I switch search engines for ethical reasons?
Switching search engines can help you avoid providing your data to large tech monopolies who use you personal information for advertising and surveillance. Even the search engines who use Google and Bing as their index score better for digital privacy than the Big Tech duo.
What makes a search engine ethical apart from privacy?
More ethical search engines not only focus on digital privacy, but have stronger policies on workers' rights, the environment, tax, and avoid connections with the military.
Are ad-funded search engines less ethical?
Ad-funded search engines can still be reasonably ethical, depending on the type of advert (personalised or contextual). Search engines using contextual adverts pass on far less personal data about you and your searches.
With Ecosia, revenue generated by people clicking on the adverts on their site funds tree planting.
Is there a search engine that does not use AI?
Most search engines now use AI to provide answer summaries instead of the traditional list of web links. The situation is constantly changing but at the moment (June 2026), 1.org, Dogpile, and Startpage did not use AI summaries, and Kagi and Mojeek only show AI summaries if you request them.
Which search engine is best for the environment?
For our climate rating, Ecosia and Mojeek scored best in this category.
Which search engine is best if I want privacy and good results?
Several search engines scored well for digital privacy - see the section in the guide above. Of the seven best scoring brands for digital privacy, most use Google and Bing as their index, so will return very similar results to those search engines, but without the personal data gathering.
What is the best ethical alternative to Google?
All the brands in this guide other than Bing (Microsoft) scored more than Google, meaning all of them are more ethical than Google.
Do ethical search engines have worse results than Google?
Almost all other search engines use Google's index, but apply better privacy policies. This means the results are going to be very similar. Some ethical search engines have developed their own indexes and you might notice some differences in results. For simple searches there may not be much difference, and for complex research it is sensible to use several different search tools anyway, to avoid bias and censorship (mentioned in the article above).
Is Ecosia really ethical, or is it just marketing?
Ecosia scores very well in nearly all categories, and is unique for its tree-planting policies.
Is DuckDuckGo still ethical?
DuckDuckGo is much more ethical than Google.
Is Brave Search more ethical than DuckDuckGo?
Brave Search and DuckDuckGo score roughly the same in our ratings, and they are both much more ethical than Google.
Additional research by Alyson Tyler
Startpage is a privacy-focused search engine that in 2019 was bought by the digital marketing company System1.
Following this acquisition, the Privacy Guides website, which recommends privacy and security tools, removed Startpage from its recommendations because of what it called the conflicting business models of the two companies: System1 states that it delivers high-intent customers to its advertising partners while Startpage offers searching without personal data collection, tracking, or targeting.
Possibly as a result of the delisting, Startpage publicly confirmed that its founders were still in charge of its privacy policy and that System1 was committed to ensuring it remained the most private search engine. Because of this, in 2020, Privacy Guides renewed its recommendation.
System1 also owns Dogpile and 1.org which do not have the same privacy protections as Startpage. Startpage therefore did much better in our Digital Privacy rating than its stablemates.
If you want to find out detailed information about a company and more about its ethical rating, then click on a brand name in the score table.
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Both Google and Microsoft (Bing) are facing current boycott calls over their involvement with the Israeli government and its genocide in Gaza. The calls have been made by the BDS campaign.
For more information see our Boycott List page.
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