advice on search engines

Search engines have steadily merged and consolidated over recent years, so the choice is now limited.

Google dominates search, followed a long way behind by Microsoft's Bing. It is generally a very good search engine in terms of comprehensiveness and relevance of its results but we can't recommend it for several reasons.

If you are concerned about the privacy of personal information about you, we recommend using Startpage. Startpage is based in the Netherlands, specialising in privacy technology. It gets its search results by acting as a proxy for Google Search. It submits your query to Google on your behalf, gets the results and displays them to you. Google therefore knows nothing about you but you get the benefit of its vast index and of the relevance of its results.