Alternative Search Engines: Who Runs Their Own Index

Short Answer

Six search engines outside Google run their own web index: Mojeek, Brave Search, Marginalia, Perplexity, Yandex and Baidu. When we reviewed these engines ourselves, we sorted them by who owns the index. An engine without its own index can be switched off by a company it competes with. Most of the names on a typical alternative search engines list do not own an index.

Our scope is the broad question of what to use instead of Google. The ranking below goes by index independence first, then by how much artificial intelligence (AI) sits on the results page, and the AI-powered engines are included rather than filtered out. Two narrower questions have their own pages here. Which engines keep AI off the results page entirely is covered in search engines without AI. Where to go after leaving Google, when DuckDuckGo is not working out, is covered in DuckDuckGo alternatives.

Google's own support page calls AI Overviews a core Search feature and states that core features cannot be turned off. The Web filter removes them, but only for the search you just ran. You have to re-apply it on every query. That repetition pushes most people toward a different default, and the per-search workarounds are covered in how to turn off AI Overviews.

Which Alternative Search Engines Run Their Own Index

An independent index means the company crawls the web with its own robot and keeps its own copy of the results. The search page then keeps working if Microsoft Bing or Google shuts off an application programming interface (API). An engine without its own index also cannot rank a page differently from its supplier, because it is displaying the supplier's ranking. Each independent engine documents its own crawler.

• Mojeek says its results are "100% independent" and come from MojeekBot and its own index, and its company timeline records "2025 - Mojeek passes 9 billion pages". A crawl that size finds small and old sites the big engines have dropped, and it also means Mojeek misses recent commercial pages the others have.
• Brave Search removed the last of its Bing API calls in April 2023. Brave's own independence post says Bing had been supplying about 7% of results before that, and that every web result now comes from Brave's index. Brave is the only fully independent engine whose result quality holds up for everyday searching.
• Marginalia runs "custom index and crawler software" under an Affero General Public License (AGPL) and prioritises non-commercial content. That focus turns up personal sites, forum posts and abandoned pages, and it will not find you a plumber or a flight.
• Perplexity operates PerplexityBot, which its documentation describes as "designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity. It is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models." Perplexity owns its retrieval layer. Its answers do not stop working when a third-party search API is revoked.
• Yandex documents more than 30 of its own robots, with YandexBot/3.0 named as the main indexing robot. Yandex is a genuinely separate index of the web. It also operates under Russian jurisdiction, which rules it out as a daily default for most Western readers.
• Baidu describes Baiduspider as the crawler "used to visit pages on the internet and build information into Baidu index". Baidu is a real second index at scale, filtered for the Chinese market, so English queries return thin results.

Every other engine below is a front end on someone else's crawler. That is not automatically a bad thing, and almost no roundup states it plainly.

Alternative Search Engines Compared by Index and AI

The Ones That Buy Results from Bing or Google

Several of the best-known privacy engines are interfaces over Microsoft Bing, and they say so on their own help pages. DuckDuckGo's sources page states that it maintains its own crawler, DuckDuckBot, and many indexes, and that traditional links and images come "largely from Bing". Requests to partners are proxied through DuckDuckGo's servers, so Microsoft does not see who asked. You get Bing's coverage without Bing's tracking, which is a real product even though it is not an independent index.

Ecosia publishes the clearest version of this. Its help centre lists three providers. Bing is "available to all users", Google is "only available in specific regions and browsers", and the European Search Perspective index is "currently only available in France". Ecosia even shows an information icon next to a result that names the provider, so you can check which index answered a given query rather than guess.

You.com is the outlier. Its API documentation describes results as "LLM-ready web results" and never says where the web data comes from, so we cannot place it in either column. Without that disclosure, anyone building on the You.com API cannot tell whose ranking they are shipping.

Europe Is Building Its Own Index

Ecosia and Qwant now co-own a search index instead of renting one. The two companies formed European Search Perspective (EUSP) as a 50/50 joint venture based in Paris, announced in November 2024. Ecosia's launch post says users in France began receiving a portion of their results directly from the EUSP index. The stated target was 30% of French queries by the end of 2025. Germany followed. Both companies had relied on Bing for years before this.

This matters to a reader outside Europe for one reason. A third large index changes the arithmetic for every reseller. An engine with two suppliers can negotiate its terms, and an engine with one takes whatever it is given.

How Much AI Each Alternative Search Engine Shows You

AI exposure and privacy are separate properties, and readers confuse the two more often than anything else we cover in these guides. DuckDuckGo scores well on privacy and depends on Bing for its index. Mojeek is independent and collects nothing, and its result quality on shopping queries will frustrate you. Neither engine is better than the other in the abstract, so pick against the property you came here for.

• No AI at all. Mojeek's NoML open letter of October 2023 argues that AI companies compress web content into models while "providing little or no traffic in return". It proposes a noml tag so site owners can stay searchable without feeding training sets. Marginalia states "Simple technology, no AI" on its front page.
• AI you have to ask for. Kagi's search sources documentation says it combines its own Teclis web index and TinyGem news index with "anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide". Its AI philosophy page says AI features are on-demand, so a plain search never returns a generated answer. Kagi is a paid product: its plans run $5 a month for 300 searches, $10 for unlimited, and $25 for the Ultimate tier. We break the tradeoff down in our Kagi review.
• AI you can switch off. DuckDuckGo runs noai.duckduckgo.com, where "AI-generated images are filtered out of image results by default, and all other AI features have been removed completely". Setting that as your browser default gets you Bing-quality results with none of the generated layer.
• AI on by default. Brave Search puts Answer with AI summaries at the top of the results page, sourced from web results and cited. Ecosia and Qwant both offer AI features next to results.
• AI is the product. Perplexity answers in prose with citations underneath, and links are the supporting material rather than the output. Treat it as a research assistant and keep a link engine as your default.

Who This Is Not For

Do not make Mojeek or Marginalia your only search engine if you shop, book travel, or look up local businesses. Both indexes are smaller than Google's by orders of magnitude, and a missing restaurant is not a privacy win. Use Brave Search or DuckDuckGo as the daily default in that case, and keep Mojeek in a second tab for the queries where a second index turns something up.

Anyone on a managed work laptop is also in the wrong place. Search defaults on those machines are usually set by policy, and changing them is an information technology (IT) request rather than a settings toggle. The same applies to a locked-down school Chromebook.

Anyone who wants only the AI-free subset is better served by search engines without AI, which filters on that one property.

What Would Change Our Answer

We recommend Brave Search because it is the only engine that pairs an independent index with mainstream result quality. Two changes would end that. The first is Brave's own AI. If Brave made Answer with AI summaries mandatory with no way to get a plain link list, it would lose the one property that makes it worth switching to. The second is EUSP coverage. If it passes a majority of queries in a country and Ecosia or Qwant ships that index outside Europe, the independent group gains a fourth serious English-language entry.

A Google policy change would move things too. Google currently offers the Web filter as a per-query option, and making it a saved setting would take much of the pressure off switching.

Verdict

Start with Brave Search for a week and keep Mojeek bookmarked for the searches Brave misses. Add Kagi only if you will pay to remove ads and pin your own preferred sources. Do not judge an engine on a few test queries whose answers you already know, because the gap between indexes shows on obscure searches. To test alternative search engines properly, change the default in your browser settings and leave it there for seven days. If the browser itself is the problem, our guides to Chrome alternatives and browsers without AI are the next step.