Every search engine review on this site is built around five checks: what the engine’s privacy policy actually says, how it handles logging and personalization, whether it runs its own index or depends on another engine, how usable the results are day-to-day, and how transparent the company is about its business model. Here’s how each one works, so you know what’s behind the ratings you read here.
1. What the Privacy Policy Actually Says
We read the privacy policy directly rather than relying on marketing claims on the homepage — those two documents don’t always agree. Specifically, we look for: whether IP addresses are logged and for how long, whether queries are ever linked to an account or device identifier, what’s shared with advertising or analytics partners, and where the company is legally based (which determines what data protection laws actually apply). We cover how to do this yourself in our guide to evaluating a search engine’s privacy policy.
2. Logging and Personalization Behavior
A “no tracking” claim means little without specifics. We check whether search history is used to personalize future results (a sign of some retention, even if temporary), whether there’s an account system at all, and whether the engine’s own support documentation or transparency reports back up its public claims.
3. Independent Index vs. Licensed Results
Some engines run their own web crawler and maintain an independent index; others license results wholesale from a larger engine (commonly Bing) and add their own privacy layer on top. Neither approach is automatically better, but it’s a meaningful technical fact readers deserve to know — an engine’s actual search quality and independence from the companies it depends on both trace back to this.
4. Everyday Usability
We run the same batch of real, varied test queries — navigational, informational, local, and long-tail — across every engine we review, and note where results genuinely fall short: outdated results, poor handling of non-English queries, weak image or news search, or an interface that’s harder to use than it needs to be.
5. Business Model Transparency
A search engine has to make money somehow, and how it does so shapes its incentives. We look at whether the model is advertising-based, subscription-based, or something else entirely (like Presearch’s token-based rewards system), and whether the company is upfront about it. Our guide to search engine business models goes into more depth on what these different approaches mean in practice.
| Check | What We’re Looking For |
|---|---|
| Privacy policy | Specific retention periods and data-sharing terms, not vague claims |
| Logging/personalization | Whether search history shapes future results or requires an account |
| Index independence | Own crawler/index vs. licensed results from another engine |
| Usability | Real test queries across categories, checked for accuracy and freshness |
| Business model | How the company actually makes money, and how clearly it says so |
What We Won’t Do
We won’t publish review scores based only on a company’s own marketing copy, and we won’t claim a search engine has technical capabilities we haven’t been able to verify. If we can’t confirm something, we say so directly in the review rather than guessing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you accept payment for positive search engine reviews?
No. Our review criteria — privacy policy specifics, logging behavior, index independence, usability, and business-model transparency — are applied the same way regardless of any relationship with the company being reviewed.
Why do you read the privacy policy instead of just the homepage claims?
Marketing copy and legal privacy policies don’t always say the same thing. The privacy policy is the document that’s actually enforceable, so it’s the one that matters most for understanding what a company can legally do with your data.
What does it mean if a search engine ‘licenses results’ from another engine?
It means the engine doesn’t run its own web crawler or maintain an independent index of the web. Instead, it sends queries to a larger search engine (commonly Bing) and displays those results, sometimes combined with its own privacy layer or additional sources.
Is an engine with its own index automatically better than one that licenses results?
Not automatically. An independent index can mean more unique results, but a smaller company’s index may also cover less of the web than a licensed feed from a much larger engine. Both approaches have trade-offs worth understanding.
How often do you re-check a search engine after publishing a review?
Privacy policies, features, and business models change over time, so a review reflects the engine as it worked at the time of research. We link to a source and note the date wherever a specific claim could change.
