A privacy focused search engine without logs or trackers, own index and above all, the special feature to show in the search result the ads, trackers and other crap waiting for us in every listed page.
Clicking in the icon marked with the arrow for an complete analytic in whotracks.me
To insert the search engine in the browser
https://ghosterysearch.com/search?q=%s
Ghostery seems to be a GmbH(1) which is a German for-profit company. Does anyone know how they're making money?
(1) https://www.ghostery.com/privacy/imprint
As a European company, it is obliged to comply with existing privacy laws (GDPR) in order to operate. The necessary income is obtained through the Ghostery Enterprise. Similar to what Proton does, although Proton is OpenSource, they require revenue for the servers for the mail service and the VPN, but they offer these for free without ads or tracking in a reduced form, in mail with the storage limit and the VPN with a reduced number of servers (21 in 3 countries), financed with premium accounts.
There are many methods of creating income on the Internet and they are normally US companies that use the method of surveillance advertising, trafficking in user data, these practices are not used in the EU due to existing privacy regulations and even large corporations have to take care of them. An example is comparing Microsoft's privacy in the US and the EU (where it is not perfect either but light years better)
Microsoft US (Blacklight)
Microsoft EU
Ghostery Private Search analytics Blacklight
Webbkoll analytics (No third party requests out of Ghostery)
https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ghostery.com%2Fprivate-search
I check the sites, services and apps with several Tools before I use them
Ok, premium features, In think that's a good business model for FOSS and closed source companies.
The best, at least better than selling userdata. Proto use it since a long time ago, all its products are OpenSource, frr versions paid by the Premium accounts with more features, apart of the basics, mre gigas in the mail and clous and more servers for the VPN. With this they can offer an decent free service without ads.