Where do the results actually come from?
This decides both result quality and what you are actually buying politically, and almost no comparison states it clearly.
Startpage forwards your query to Google and returns Google's results, having stripped everything identifying — Google sees a query from Startpage, not from you. You get Google's result quality with none of the profiling. Ecosia does the same with Bing. Qwant runs its own crawler for part of its index and supplements it.
MetaGer is a metasearch engine: it queries several sources and combines the results, with the sources configurable, which means no single index decides what you see.
Mojeek runs its own crawler, its own index and its own ranking algorithm. That is genuinely rare — there are only a handful of independent web indexes in the world, and it means Mojeek's results are not Google's or Bing's with a privacy wrapper. Results differ, sometimes usefully and sometimes worse, but they are arrived at independently.
If your reason for leaving Google is privacy, a forwarding engine solves it. If your reason is that one company should not decide what the web looks like, only Mojeek and MetaGer actually address that.
How is a free search engine paid for, and does that compromise it?
Through advertising, in every case here — but the difference is whether the advertising is targeted at you personally.
Conventional search builds a profile from your history, location and behaviour and sells access to it. These engines show ads matched to the query alone: someone searching "running shoes" sees a shoe advertisement without anyone recording that you searched for it. That is a materially different arrangement and it is why the privacy claim is compatible with a free product.
Ecosia is the most transparent about the money: it publishes monthly financial reports showing income and how it was spent, and directs advertising revenue to tree planting. It is a certified B Corp, which is an external audit of that commitment rather than a self-description.
MetaGer is different again, run by the non-profit association SUMA-EV and supported by donations — no shareholder, no growth expectation, and open-source code so the claims are inspectable.
The uncomfortable case is Startpage, which is Dutch and privacy-protecting but owned by System1, a US advertising company. The protections are technical and have been examined, and the ownership is still worth knowing rather than discovering later.
What is Anonymous View and why does it matter more than the search itself?
Because a private search that lands you on a tracked page has protected only the first click. You searched anonymously and then handed the destination site your IP address, your browser fingerprint and a cookie.
Startpage's Anonymous View closes that: it opens the result through a proxy, so the website sees Startpage rather than you. No IP, no fingerprint, nothing to attach to a profile. MetaGer offers the same capability through its anonymous proxy.
For anyone actually trying not to be tracked — researching an illness, a legal problem, an employer, a competitor — this matters far more than which engine returned the link, because the destination site is where the tracking infrastructure lives.
The cost is that proxied pages load more slowly and interactive sites often break, so it is a per-search choice rather than a default. Knowing it exists is most of the benefit.
What do you give up leaving Google, honestly?
Personalisation and the tightly integrated extras, and it is worth being clear that the first one is partly a loss.
Google results improve with your history and location. A private engine cannot do that by definition, so local queries need explicit context — "plumber Utrecht" rather than "plumber" — and a search that depends on remembering what you looked at last week will not work.
Result quality itself is less of a gap than expected for the forwarding engines: Startpage returns Google's actual results and Ecosia returns Bing's, so the ranking is the same one you already trust. Mojeek is where quality genuinely differs, being an independent index rather than a mirror.
The integrated extras — flight search, live sports, the answer box built from your calendar — mostly go. Qwant covers maps, news and shopping search, and Swisscows adds image and video search, but none of it matches Google's depth.
The practical approach most people land on is to set a private engine as the default and keep Google for the queries where it genuinely wins, which after a month is fewer than expected.
Which engine suits a school, a family or an organisation?
Swisscows is the one built for it. Content filtering is on by default rather than a setting to enable, making adult material unavailable rather than merely deprioritised — which is a different guarantee from Google SafeSearch, since SafeSearch can be turned off by whoever is using the machine.
For a school or a family computer that distinction is the whole point: a filter that a curious teenager can disable in two clicks is not a filter. Swisscows also uses semantic search, understanding query meaning rather than matching keywords, which helps with the imprecise questions children actually type.
Qwant offers Qwant Junior specifically for children, and is French with EU data centres, which for a French or Belgian school aligns with public-sector procurement expectations.
Swisscows stores data in Switzerland — in a data centre inside a Swiss Alps bunker — under Swiss law with an adequacy decision. For an EU school that is lawful, though a French or German institution may prefer Qwant or MetaGer for intra-EEA processing.
