For 20 years, most of us have taken Google for granted as the obvious place to go to find what we’re looking for online. Google is also built into both iPhone and Android mobile phones as well as in most browsers. At the same time, the options have been there all along and it may be time to consider them.
Why would you want to replace Google as a search engine?
The short answer is that Google is changing.
For 20 years, most of us have taken Google for granted as the obvious place to go to find what we’re looking for online. Google is also built into both iPhone and Android mobile phones as well as in most browsers. At the same time, the options have been there all along and it may be time to consider them.
Why would you want to replace Google as a search engine?
The short answer is that Google is changing.
When you do a Google search, you no longer get primarily a series of links, but an AI summary of what you searched for. Google is in the process of taking it a step further so that you don’t just have the AI summary first and the links later, you simply stay in Google and get all the information in AI form.
There may be reasons to both like and dislike this. If you’re one of those who more or less stopped using Google because you use ChatGPT for everything, it might soon be an argument to start using Google again. But if we talk about reasons for not liking the change, they are many:
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It’s a change, that is, Google no longer works the way you’re used to, you liked the way it was before and wished there was some way to get it the way it was.
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Google’s reliance on AI makes the answers more uncertain, and it becomes more difficult to find the source of the claims presented in the AI summary.
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AI is notoriously power-hungry, and you might find it unnecessarily resource-intensive to get an AI response every time you look up a web page.
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You are concerned about privacy when you feed the AI information with your searches.
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If the web pages that generate the information on which Google bases its AI answers do not receive any visitors, they lose their source of income and can no longer be operated further, which risks depleting the content of the web in a way that even Google loses in the long run.
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From a purely moral point of view, it can also be seen as Google making money from other people’s work without paying anything for it itself.
If you feel you agree with one or more of the reasons above, there are options that better meet your needs.
Some alternatives to Google as a search engine.
There are a large number of alternatives to Google as a search engine, but some are more relevant than others. Here are the ones we think are most interesting.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is primarily a browser but also a search engine, which has seen a large influx of new users after Google announced and implemented its changes. It has thus become something of the first choice for those who are dissatisfied with Google.
The reason is probably DuckDuckGo’s focus on privacy.”We are for data protection, not data collection” as they themselves put it.
Of course, the privacy gains are even greater if you use their browser, but if you don’t want to receive targeted advertising based on your web searches, DuckDuckGo is a clear alternative.
DuckDuckGo does not dismiss AI answers, on the contrary, they have theirs Duck.ai as its own tab in the search engine, but you make a clear choice between doing a search and asking the AI. Duck.ai in turn guarantees that your AI questions are anonymized and not used to train any AI, this in accordance with agreements with the providers of AI they use. You choose which AI the question should go to, among others ChatGPT, Claude and Mistral, and when you make the choices you also see which rules apply to the different AI questions.
Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s equivalent of Google’s search engine, and the default option in the Edge browser in Windows. If you’re worried about the power of the IT giants, you won’t solve anything by choosing Bing, but if you want something that’s more like Google used to be, Bing is considerably more conservative. You get pure link searches when you search, and only if you specifically select the AI search tab does Microsoft throw in its AI chatbot Copilot.
If you tried Bing years ago, you might have felt that it was worse than Google, because Google could recognize when you misspelled and search for what you meant and not what you typed, while Bing only searched for what you typed verbatim. That time is over and Bing and the other alternative search engines are good at recognizing typos.
Ecosia
Ecosia is a search service and browser with a non-profit environmental focus. When you use the search engine, you get sponsored posts like in other search engines, but the profit you make after the operating costs are paid goes to environmental and climate measures. They mainly use the money to plant trees and protect them around the world, but they also invest in renewable energy projects.
Ecosia claims to protect privacy and beyond the information needed for the sponsored posts it claims to collect no data about users.
Ecosia is not opposed to AI, but for environmental reasons they write that they choose smaller language models that draw less energy. There is a clear division between pure searches and AI questions in the form of different tabs, so you are never steered towards AI answers against your will. I can’t see or select which AI model is being used, but when I ask the AI it says it’s using a model from the French Mistral.
More options
There are many more options, and when you switch in mobile, you choose from a list. If privacy is what you are thinking about, there is, for example, Qwant with a minimalist interface and European origin, Startpage, which likes to compare itself to DuckDuckGo to show that it has even better privacy protection for users, and Brave, which gives you links and AI summaries in parallel, but with a privacy focus.
It’s easy to change the search engine on your mobile, that’s how you do it
Largely thanks to the EU, it is easier than ever to choose a search engine on the mobile phone.
You can not only choose the search engine in your mobile, you have to. When you start a new mobile, you get to choose both which browser should be the default and which search engine. These are demands that the EU has placed on Google and Apple. If they lock users into their own platforms, they are breaking EU competition rules. Within the EU, it is therefore not permitted to make it difficult to choose a search engine.
In practice, the mobile remembers your settings so you don’t have to make a new choice every time you have a new mobile, but it is also easy to choose again, for example because you no longer like Google search.
In practice, you may need to change more than one place in the mobile. If you use more than one browser, you choose in each individual browser, and if you have a search widget connected to Google, it works independently of the browser. Here’s how to choose a search engine.
Iphone/iPad
Go into your phone’s settings and select Apps. Scroll down to Safari. Under “Search” you can select a search engine. You can choose between Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
Android
You need to change the browser(s) you use. If you use Chrome, go to the browser, press the menu with the three dots, select settings, then search engine. There are eight options to choose from, including the ones we mentioned above. If you use Samsung’s browser, press the three dots here as well and select settings, then search in the address field. The options here are a bit more limited and, for example, Ecosia is missing. If you have another browser, the principle is the same, you go into the settings and look for search.
If you have a search field on your home screen as a widget, it still goes to the Google app, and you can’t change it. However, the search services that have their own browsers also have their own widgets. so you can, for example, install the DuckDuckGo browser on your mobile, then you can long press the home screen and select widgets, and you will find search fields from DuckDuckGo there that you can replace Google’s search field with.
It doesn’t have to be either or
Just because you chose a different default browser, accessing Google is not difficult.
The default search engine is really just a convenient shortcut that allows you to do a search directly from the address bar. Do you feel that you sometimes miss Google’s AI summaries but on the whole are happy with your change, you can, for example, add a bookmark to www.google.com in your browser, it’s easy to do a google search if you’re not satisfied. You can also use the Google app, which is pre-installed on Android mobiles and can be downloaded to the iPhone as a quick shortcut to Google search. You can also have several different browsers installed on your mobile and choose different default search engines for each browser.
So you don’t have to feel like you’re taking a big step by choosing another search engine as your default. Of course, it is also just as easy to switch again as it was the first time you chose.