Decoder with Nilay Patel

Ecosia: https://info.ecosia.org/privacy

- IP address (obfuscated), user agent string, search term, and some settings like your country and language setting.

- Additionally, by default Ecosia sets a Bing-specific “Client ID” parameter to improve the quality of your search results. If your browser has “Do Not Track” enabled, we disable the “Client ID” automatically.

Qwant: https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/

– The first three bytes of your IP address;

– A salted hash generated from: your IP address, your User Agent and a salt that changes at least every 3 months.

Neeva https://neeva.com/privacy

- I heard that they pass first 3 octets of IP (as I have heard from others seeking syndication with Microsoft) - edit: CEO Sridhar explains that in this podcast (40 minutes in) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/recode-decode-sridhar-...

DDG https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

- Not declared but say "What search engines generally do when they anonymize data is get rid of part of your IP address or turn it into something that doesn't look exactly like an IP address."

Self-disclosure: CEO of Mojeek search engine

I am familiar with Neeva and listened to the podcast with its founder which I recommend to people interested in the field.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sridhar-ramaswamy-your...

I am a bit skeptical about the whole thing for two main reasons:

- Sridhar spent 15 years building the behemoth that is Google's ad business. It has to be hard to shrug off 'don't be evil until you do' culture and mindset that easily. - I think they can do a good job at specialized searches (like the one illustrated in the article). But the problem is that the web search is general, not specialized. They can not expect the users to pay $30/mo and still go to Google for general searches. Bing API results are subpar to Google results.

I do welcome a paid model for a well executed search engine. I would personally pay $100/mo for one that meets my needs.