Whoogle is awesome, check it out:
Features
- No ads or sponsored content
- No JavaScript*
- No cookies**
- No tracking/linking of your personal IP address***
- No AMP links
- No URL tracking tags (i.e. utm=%s)
- No referrer header
- Tor and HTTP/SOCKS proxy support
- Autocomplete/search suggestions
- POST request search and suggestion queries (when possible)
- View images at full res without site redirect (currently mobile only)
- Light/Dark/System theme modes (with support for custom CSS theming)
- Randomly generated User Agent
- Easy to install/deploy
- DDG-style bang (i.e. ! ) searches
- Optional location-based searching (i.e. results near )
- Optional NoJS mode to view search results in a separate window with JavaScript blocked
I feel like Google is still the best search engine (although it has been getting worse), but obviously a bit of a privacy concern. Whoogle is a proxy that can put up a privacy buffer of sorts, so you can still use Google proper without basically signing up to be spied on.
A major gotcha is you kind of have to host your own instance to have a good experience. There are public Whoogle instances like whoogle.io, but they are aggressively rate-limited now. A lot of times queries will be blocked if a bunch of people are using it. It’s pretty annoying.
It doesn’t take much to run a Whoogle server though. In fact, if you want to just run it on your EOS machine you can install the AUR version: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/whoogle-git/ It just runs on localhost in your browser.