Why do we require privacy on search?

When we perform a search on search engines and click on our search results, our search terms or key words are sent to the website we clicked on (via an HTTP referrer header). This concept of sharing personal information is called ‘search leakage’. In simple words, when we search for something private, we are sharing that private search information with our search engine as well as with the websites that we clicked on for that search. Also, when we visit any website after that, our computer automatically sends important information about the websites we visited along with our IP address and user agent, to that clicked website. So, basically, when we perform a search, other websites know our search terms and they also know that we searched for them.

Some search engines save our history, along with the date and time of the search, as well as some important computer information such as our user agent, IP address or our account information (name and login information, if we are logged in).

This availability of information about us does raise some privacy concerns. Thankfully, there are some search engines that avoid these privacy and security problems. The three most popular ones are listed here.

DuckDuckGo: This is one of the most popular Internet search engines, with its main motto being to protect searchers’ privacy and to avoid the creation of personalised search results for users. DuckDuckGo puts privacy first and