Throughout the web’s history, alternative browsers and search engines have struggled to be seen and compete with the mainstream. The idiomatic “just Google it” has reflected Google’s near-monopoly over search since 1998. But recent concerns over Google’s AI reliance and environmental impact, data privacy, and search accuracy, plus the desire for new experiences, have sparked interest in the competition.
Many web browsers and search engines come packaged together under one brand, Google included. However, a web browser is the system that displays websites while a search engine is the system that pulls up webpages in response to users’ searches. We will explore both, including some quirky standalones, all available free.
Generative AI summaries, which pull and recombine information from original sources, are not search results. But Google has proposed replacing search with AI entirely or as its priority. “Ask Google” has now replaced “Search Google” in the used-to-be search and URL bars. For generations who have learned Google Fu across two decades, this change imposed against all consumer demand and user experience sensibilities could restrict our proven methods to seek credible information online.
Our search for other search engines and browsers can broaden our horizons. We can resist the limitations of what algorithms and surveillance tech decide for us and rediscover the web of information, entertainment, and authentic experience.
Mainstream Browsers
Google’s biggest competition mainly comes from other browsers, as they gained fame for the search engine. We can compare capabilities of big companies’ offerings to Chrome and Google Search before covering more eclectic, privacy-focused alternatives.
The Microsoft Edge browser and Bing search engine are packaged together but can mix-and-match with others. According to the memes: the most common search made on them is to “Google.” Famously, Google has more precise results for “long tail searches” for something with specific keywords, although the AI emphasis is degrading this. Bing has as much non-optional AI. However, recommendations for Bing include higher-quality images in the image search and visual search capabilities to identify information about an image.
Apple’s Safari browser comes preinstalled on devices with Apple operating systems (macOS, iOS, etc). It boasts “the world’s fastest browser” and is mainly recommended for improved battery life on Apple devices. Otherwise, it functions similarly to Chrome and is rarely sought for non-Apple operating systems.
The Opera browser has gained popularity for both its AI-based browser and claims to privacy, free built-in VPN and ad blocker, and gaming capabilities. It uses the same Chromium engine as Google Chrome, so it is commonly recommended for the extra capabilities.
Privacy, environmental impact, and sometimes usability (although convenience is often the tradeoff) are the biggest draws for small-name search engines and browsers.
Mozilla Firefox Browser
In researching this article, I’ve found articles and Reddit threads where the question is why people “still” use Firefox. Many know Mozilla as the literal “dinosaur” company outcompeted by Google and don’t realize that Firefox has survived. For over 3 years now, I’ve returned to using Firefox separately from my SEO work on Chrome for a true work-life balance. But Firefox’s commitment to privacy goes much further.
Firefox reports that they “block trackers by default” for fewer targeted ads than Chrome, offer additional settings blocking fingerprinting, and lack Google’s corporate interest to appease shareholders. They have always used convenient tab controls, bookmarks, and history features on par with Chrome.
I have experienced Firefox loading about as fast as Chrome except when restoring a previous session, which can lag. You have options to sync your Chrome data or keep Firefox neatly separate, and set any search engine beyond the Google default. Firefox even now offers a built-in VPN and controls to make AI features optional (as they should be!)
For more customization, many third-party extensions support Firefox just like Chrome. I’ve used uBlock Origin and made sites that lag from ads (looking at you, Genius.com and news sites) downright usable!
The homepage boasts, “Firefox helps you shape a more personal internet that puts you back in control.” These personalization features have made it a powerful choice for the hobbyist web users serious about security.
Tor Browser
Many of us associate the Tor browser with internet horror stories about the “deep web” or “dark net”. I’ll cut through the sensationalism: the “hitman sites” and “red rooms” are fake, cryptocurrency is overhyped, and what criminal sites you can find are as likely to be a scam or honeypot. After all, intelligence agencies made Tor available in the first place. Safe to assume Big Brother is still watching.
But Tor offers users advanced privacy and security, with immense implications for democracy and freedom of information. Tor protects your cookies, browsing history, and location data from third party trackers. Sites such as The Guardian, ProPublica, and Wikipedia have a “.onion” presence for their commitment to providing journalism in countries with internet censorship.
These links ending in “.onion” are also called “hidden services” because the links work on Tor but not the “surface web”. Entire blogs, forums, chatrooms, and other communities exist solely on the deep web with enthusiasm for the software capabilities and cultures of anonymity. There’s “another web” waiting out there for you to discover!
And it only took a minute browsing the most famous .onion link directories to see (and not click!) all manner of illegal sites openly advertised. Just remember: like all forms of being a jerk on the internet, when you break the law on Tor you break the law in real life.
In my experience, Tor loaded fast except for some “.onion” links breaking. Its search engine defaults to DuckDuckGo with other options, browsing the “surface web” as efficiently as any other. Facebook even has their own “.onion” address claiming not to datamine you like last time; the directories that also link to shady marketplaces say “trust them at your peril”.
“Surface web” sites like YouTube or streaming services behave oddly with Tor’s built-in VPN, playing ads in other languages and not loading videos. Fixing this takes some know-how. So I’d recommend Tor most as an escape from those mainstream activities that surface web browsers can better optimize.
Please don’t delete my article, CIA agent reading this!
DuckDuckGo Browser and Search
In recent years, DuckDuckGo has become a big name in data privacy. The search engine and browser offers an alternative without targeted ads or IP address tracking.
The website offers to “Search privately & block trackers,” “Block annoying cookie pop-ups,” “Watch YouTube without targeted ads,” and “Hide your email address.” DuckDuckGo emphasizes that its AI features are optional and not trained on your exchanges with chatbots. However, the search engine turns these on by default and you will need the browser itself or the noai.duckduckgo.com address to turn them off.
DuckDuckGo uses an altered form of Bing and Yahoo’s search indexes, which are less precise than Google. However, the lack of tracking provides the assurance that searches will not become less precise through biased, targeted results. DuckDuckGo can still serve location-targeted results (like “restaurants near me”) but asks permission. It can also pull up Wikipedia quotes for informational searches in place of AI summaries.
The browser’s “DuckDuckGo player” on YouTube can optionally play videos without targeted ads. This feature removes the tracking that YouTube otherwise enables on all browsers.
Overall, DuckDuckGo trades search precision for the ideal of data privacy and search engines as non-personalized directories for information. Search becomes what it used to be: autocomplete suggestions come from all users’ searches until you have objective data on the most common searches without an algorithm boxing you in. It’s a worthy contender with just a few tradeoffs in convenience.
Ecosia Browser and Search
Since 2009, Ecosia has made a splash as a search engine and browser that lets users plant trees with every search. The company now reports over 250 million trees planted and servers running 100% on renewable energy.
The Ecosia website allows users to search with or without an account to measure trees planted. The Chromium-based browser defaults to Ecosia search with the Chrome browser’s main capabilities such as bookmarks, history, and equivalent speed. It can also import settings from other browsers and use extensions compatible with Chrome.
I also randomly discovered the browser played no ads on my YouTube videos and was able to watch “free with ads” movies free from ads, no joke.
With AI’s water consumption estimated to equal the needs of 1.3 billion people annually, switching to Ecosia now feels like penance. But Ecosia still uses generative AI, claiming “we produce more clean energy than it takes to power all searches and AI queries.” Browser and account settings allow you to turn these off, more mercifully than Google, but you can still expect to see the environmental tradeoff in anonymous searches.
I quit Ecosia years ago over low-accuracy search results, but now that Google has the same problem, it deserves a second look. The search results are now slightly better than Google: sponsored results do not take precedence as often for informational searches. Ecosia shows as many sponsored results for product searches, however.
The strongest draw for Ecosia is its environmental commitment, but with Chromium now improving the search accuracy, it’s also a worthy contender in usability.
Brave Browser and Search
Brave has also emerged recently as a private search engine and browser. The site boasts “zero profiling,” a built-in VPN, and blocking of all ads or cookie popups on all sites. Sure enough, my tests of known websites including YouTube showed that Brave blocks ads and popups as smoothly as the third-party extensions that other browsers need specially installed.
Like DuckDuckGo, Brave has AI features (such as overviews) that are optional but turned on by default. It also asks if you want to import data from other browsers during the setup and its homepage saves previously-viewed sites.
The “new tab” page on Brave had some UI issues as some of its advertised features (“Brave News”) started overlapping the search bar. I also found that after closing and reopening the browser window, Brave restored my original tabs automatically, which could be convenient unless you wanted a clean slate. Such usability features might take some getting used to, or the installation of a different search engine or homepage.
As for search performance? Brave is a Chromium browser with an independent search index, which provides unbiased, non-personalized search results like DuckDuckGo but with more accuracy. Most results were similar to Google, with occasional sponsored ads but no profiling or targeted ads.
For its balance of privacy and Google-level search accuracy with none of the datamining, Brave may be the strongest contender in usability for a combined browser and search engine.
UDM=14 Search
For an alternative search engine that doesn’t make many lists, but gets shared by word-of-mouth, I’ll be a good netizen and let you in on the secret of udm14.com – “the disenshittification Konami Code.” This site enables Google searches with the AI summaries removed. Typing the “&udm=14” code at the end of any search or adding it to URLs also works, but this site provides a path-of-least-resistance for the opt-out that Google itself won’t provide. I’ve used it for most searches over the past year.
You can expect udm=14 results to match Google searches closely, but the tool also strips out sponsored results. The “chair” search produced only the product listings using organic SEO. “I give you a hamburger” even had all but three results matching the Cuil Theory meme, which I tested to see if Google still recognized context better than a memeably bad old search engine. So results using this Google code are slightly more accurate to the search context.
If you miss the old Google that still preached “Don’t be evil,” UDM=14 Search is an appealing force for good.
Research-Based Search Engines
We haven’t confirmed if “WorldCat” is named after this meme of a grand unified conspiracy.
Search engines specifically for academic and library research are also alternatives to Google Scholar.
RefSeek enables searches of credible sources publicly available on the web. It distinguishes between web pages and documents (e.g. PDFs) conveniently. My results included academic articles, news sources such as Reuters, and even Britannica and Wikipedia (rules for only citing Wikipedia’s sources still apply!) As a Google alternative, RefSeek can cut unreliable news sources in addition to aiding academic research.
WorldCat provides a search of libraries near you for specific books, articles, and other materials on topics you choose. Availability of these for free online will vary, but they explain you can link your local library to any item and request it through interlibrary loan.
BASE Search provides a search of academic articles with 70% available online free. Within the first search, I easily found PDF links for easy downloading.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) likewise offers a search of academic documents with download links and options to filter by field of study.
You can avoid the steep paywalls on academic articles legally by emailing the authors for a copy or searching for copies on alternative sites such as arXiv.
“Cozy Web” Search Engines
Sites like “cameronsworld.net” recreate the quirky ways the old web used to be. Source: Cameron’s World
For fun and education, I’d also like to promote search engines that bring back the alternative way of “surfing the web” over brief searches and social media use. The terms “cozy web”, “small web”, “indie web”, and “web revival” have emerged for the recent movement of recreating personal websites like the 90s web offered. Search engines built for these sites trade speed, accuracy, and links to mainstream sites for the old experience of discovering something new and curious every time.
Wiby presents a search engine for sites without Javascript, excluding 98% of the modern internet. Search results may be archived sites not seen in decades or modern sites built the old-fashioned way. They promote “finding things you didn’t know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing.” The “surprise me” button for random sites is most alluring: my tests included sites on Canada information, the history of rappelling, and literal cat scans. The real internet THEY don’t want you to see!!1!!oneone!!1
My “chair” test on Wiby yielded random topics, no sales in sight. These included pages for H. L. Mencken on Project Gutenberg and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, so the word search is imprecise but a win for literacy.
Marginalia Search presents a true alternative to major search engines using keyword-accurate searches of marginalized websites. Per my wishlist, it “prioritizes non-commercial content” with “simple technology, no AI” and “no data shared with 3rd parties.” The first results for “chair” include Wikipedia, plus blogs and forums: they meant the “non-commercial” part, but you’ll easily find information. You can filter sources by Blogs, Academia, Vintage, Small Web, Wikis, Forums, and Recipes. Now you can have your cake and eat it without clickbait spam of someone’s life story!
Search My Site provides a curated search for “only user-submitted and moderated sites”. The name fits: all results show personal websites including exact words searched. You can sort results by “Score (high-low)”, “Published (new-old)”, and “Modified (new-old)”. The “Browse”, “Newest”, and “Random” buttons show their selections of sites for you to get informed, get entertained, or just peruse.
The Old Net shows just that: options to view sites on the Internet Archive between 1994 and 2010 or search words on the Geocities archive. Searches often return a Gateway Time-out error, so browse the throwback sites with patience. Scrolling the homepage, the site links other “old web” resources worth a look.
Mixing and matching your choices of browsers and search engines can put you back in the driver’s seat of your web experience. When mainstream options are tailored to profiling and selling to you, learning the alternatives can return you to an “Information Superhighway” once more.
