Browsers & Search

Brave Search as primary. It runs an independent index (not a reskinned Bing or Google feed), which puts it in a different category from most "private" search engines. Result quality is competitive and well past the rising-star phase. It's the default in Brave already; in other browsers it's two clicks to set.

Startpage as secondary. You get proxied Google results plus the Anonymous View feature: the pragmatic answer when you need Google's result quality without the direct relationship. The caveat: it's owned by System1, an ad-tech company. It's fine as a secondary with clear utility, but not trustworthy enough by design to be your primary.

Qwant if you want a second independent index. It's French, runs a partial index of its own, sits under GDPR, and has a credible privacy stance. It's not as robust as Brave Search, but it's a reasonable European-backed option to rotate in.

DuckDuckGo, with eyes open. It's usable and easy, but it's primarily Bing-backed and inherits Bing's limitations. In 2022 its CEO publicly endorsed down-ranking sites associated with Russian disinformation; much of the mechanism came from Microsoft's own policy changes, but the endorsement was DDG's. If you can't control your index, you can't fully control your results. It's fine for casual use; just don't treat it as neutral.

Kagi if you'll pay to opt out of the ad economy entirely. It's a paid, no-ads, no-tracking search engine with independent ranking signals: your subscription funds the business directly instead of your data or attention doing it indirectly. It's worth it if search quality is something you'll budget for like any other tool, rather than something that has to be free.

SearXNG for a self-hostable, no-account option. It's an open-source metasearch engine that pulls results from other engines (Google, Bing, Brave Search, and more) without forwarding your identity to any of them. Run your own instance for full control, or use one of the many public instances if you trust the operator. There's no tracking either way.

Fingerprinting matters more than cookies now. Trackers don't need a cookie if your screen size, fonts, GPU, and timezone combine into a configuration unique enough to identify you across sites. Aggressive fingerprinting defenses (Brave's randomization, Mullvad Browser's uniformity) address this directly; stock Chromium and unhardened Firefox don't.

uBlock Origin is the one extension worth installing. Every extra "privacy" extension piled on top tends to make you more identifiable, not less: each one adds another fingerprintable signature to your browser's configuration. On Brave, Shields already cover what most of those extensions claim to do, so skip the pile entirely. On Firefox, Gecko still runs uBlock Origin unrestricted, unlike Chromium's Manifest V3 limits.

Tor Browser is what gives you actual anonymity, not these. Nothing else on this page hides who you are from a determined observer: these picks reduce tracking, they don't make you anonymous. Private/incognito mode in particular is not privacy: it only clears local history, while your ISP, employer, DNS resolver, and the sites themselves see exactly the same traffic. Different problem, different tool.