One of the quickest and easiest ways to improve your privacy as well as your search experience is to stop using Google as your default search engine. When you open a browser like Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, it typically opens to a page with a search box where you can type what you're searching for. For instance, in the Firefox browser, the home page looks like this:
On most browsers, the search engine is set to be Google by default. But you can easily change that. If your browser is Chrome or Firefox, the instructions to change it are below.
- Changing the default search engine in Firefox
- Changing the default search engine in Chrome
- Other search engine options
Changing the default search engine in Firefox
In Firefox, click on the hamburger menu in the upper right hand corner and select "Settings" in the dropdown menu.
Once you're in settings, look for "Search" in the left hand sidebar.
At the top of the search settings page under where it says "Default Search Engine", click the dropdown menu and select DuckDuckGo (you can also choose Bing; the other options are site-specific).
Changing the default search engine in Chrome
In Chrome, click on the three stacked dots in the upper right hand corner and then select "Settings" from the menu.
Then look for "Search engine" in the left hand sidebar.
Next to where it says "Google" (yuck), click "Change".
Then, in the box that pops up, select "DuckDuckGo" and click "Set as Default".
Other Search Engine Options
Congratulations, you have successfully de-googled your search engine. But what if you don't want to use DuckDuckGo? Fair enough. There are other search engines out there. DuckDuckGo is currently the only Google alternative that you can set as default in most browsers. But you can still choose to use an alternative search engine. There are a number of other search engines to choose from:
- Startpage
- SearXNG
- Qwant
- Brave Search
- Kagi (costs money)
- Ecosia
The only search engine I have personally tried so far is DuckDuckGo, so I can't say much about how good the other options are. I may test them out at some point and update this article with any findings. But for now, I'll simply let you know that they exist and let you check them out for yourself.
If you use one of these search engines, you will need to set it as your homepage or add it as a plugin to your browser (if a plugin version is available--so far I noticed Qwant has a plugin for Firefox).
I will note that Bing is another search engine option that, like DuckDuckGo, can be set as the default search engine in your browser settings. However, Bing is owned by Microsoft, whom I have a deep and personal dislike of, so I don't recommend that option.