{"id":277327,"date":"2026-06-18T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/18\/i-ditched-google-search-for-a-service-that-actually-respects-my-privacy\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T19:16:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T23:16:12","slug":"i-ditched-google-search-for-a-service-that-actually-respects-my-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/18\/i-ditched-google-search-for-a-service-that-actually-respects-my-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"I ditched Google Search for a service that actually respects my privacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/i-stopped-using-google-search-this-is-what-i-use-now\/\">I ditched Google Search for a service that actually respects my privacy<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/i-stopped-using-google-search-this-is-what-i-use-now\/\">https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/i-stopped-using-google-search-this-is-what-i-use-now\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-06-18 16:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.makeuseof.com\">www.makeuseof.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Small tech&#8221; is having its moment. There has been a substantial increase in people switching to community-driven software that is built to serve its users, rather than suits at large faceless organizations. A few examples of such software include the note-taking app Obsidian, the image editing tool GIMP, and the decentralized social media network Mastodon.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to search engines, Google has hovered around 90% market share for more than a decade. However, this doesn&#8217;t mean that alternative search engines are suffering. In fact, many users, including me, have switched to privacy-first alternatives like DuckDuckGo, which saw growth of 30.5% on May 25 (after Google I\/O 2026), according to Thurrott. And for good reason.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"duckduckgo-isn-39-t-profiling-me-with-each-search\">\n                        DuckDuckGo isn&#8217;t profiling me with each search<br \/>\n               <\/h2>\n<h3 id=\"the-occasional-irrelevant-ad-is-a-small-price-to-pay-for-privacy\">\n            The occasional irrelevant ad is a small price to pay for privacy<br \/>\n    <\/h3>\n<p>Google&#8217;s business model still relies on ads. Your activity across Google products, such as web search, YouTube, and Google Maps, is used to create a detailed profile of you, which Google uses to serve you targeted ads. In fact, this profiling isn&#8217;t limited to your activity on Google apps; Google also tracks you across third-party websites that use Google Analytics and Ads.<\/p>\n<p>DuckDuckGo, too, serves ads. However, these ads are contextual and not based on your search history or web activity. It&#8217;s not logging your IP addresses and other unique identifiers,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/i-stopped-using-google-search-this-is-what-i-use-now\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I ditched Google Search for a service that actually respects my privacy https:\/\/www.makeuseof.com\/i-stopped-using-google-search-this-is-what-i-use-now\/ Publish Date:&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":277328,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static0.makeuseofimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/wm\/2026\/06\/a-laptop-with-google-search-s-ai-mode-enabled.jpeg?w=1600&h=900&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277327"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277329,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277327\/revisions\/277329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}