It's hard to imagine life without Google. The internet as we know it is built around search engines, and Google is the biggest of them all. In 2024, Google was the primary search engine for 76% of desktop users and 95% of mobile users.
Even if you don't have Google Chrome on your device, you probably use Google Search multiple times a day without thinking about it.
If you have an iPhone and you open the Safari app to perform a search, you're automatically using Google. That's no accident: Google pays Apple $20 billion a year to be Safari's default search engine. And that can be a problem, especially if you're tired of seeing Google's AI overviews.
What if you prefer to search the old-fashioned way, by browsing through a list of blue links without the assistance of AI? Or what if you don't want to use Google at all? How can you look something up without "Googling it"?
You can in fact switch your default search engine in most web browsers, and it's not too much of a hassle -- you just need to know where to look.
How do I change my default search engine in Safari?
Safari defaults to Google for searches, but it also allows you to choose from one of these options instead: Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo or Ecosia.
While Yahoo's search engine is much less popular than Google's, it debuted in 1995, three years before Google's official launch. DuckDuckGo launched in 2008, followed by Microsoft Bing and Ecosia in 2009.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that won't automatically track your searches. While it does show you ads based on what you look up, it won't save your search history and personal data to show you targeted ads (the way most other search engines do).
Ecosia uses the profits from its search engine to support climate action, with a stated goal of planting more trees around the world. It provides Google search results by default, though it gives you the option of switching to Microsoft Bing.
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