In terms of privacy, this is how the Searxes (meta of meta searches) compares to DDG, Startpage, and Mojeek:

privacy factor DDG Startpage Mojeek Searxes
caught violating privacy policy yes no no no
bad track record (history of privacy abuse) yes (CEO founded Names DB) owned by targetted ad agency no
feeds other privacy abusers yes (Verizon-Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, CloudFlare) yes (Google, CloudFlare) no no
privacy-hostile sites in search results yes yes yes (but appears less frequent than ddg) no (CloudFlare sites filtered out)
server code is open source no no no yes
has an onion site yes (but Tor-hostile results still given) no no yes
gives users a proxy or cache no yes (using Anonymous View feature) no yes (via the favicons)

Superficially Metager is privacy respecting and there’s even an .onion host for it. So I’ll have to add it to the table in the future.

For the moment, I’ll say that Metager shares the following with advertisers:

  • first 2 blocks of your IP address
  • user-agent string
  • your search query They say it’s for non-personalised advertizing.