Search is where curiosity goes first — health worries, legal questions, things you'd never say out loud. The default engines turn that stream of intent into an advertising profile; these ones answer the question and forget you asked.
Every engine here is European-owned, and the dossiers spell out the one thing marketing pages bury: whose index the results actually come from.
The verdict: France's flagship attempt at search independence. Ads match the query, not the person typing it — advertising the way it worked before it turned into surveillance.
The verdict: The engine that turns ad clicks into trees — over 200 million planted and counting. Results come from the big indexes, but the profits go somewhere you can actually point to.
The verdict: Google's answers without Google's gaze — your query goes through as theirs, not yours. The pragmatic pick if result quality is non-negotiable but profiling is.
The verdict: One of the very few engines on Earth crawling its own index rather than reselling someone else's. Results can feel rougher — that's what actual independence looks like.
The verdict: A nonprofit meta-search that queries many engines at once and strips you out of the request. Run by idealists, and it shows — in both the mission and the interface.
