DuckDuckGo

It's an odd name, yes, but DuckDuckGo has a lot going for it in terms of privacy. Quite frankly, it's like Google used to be (that is, a simple search bar, without any extras). The main thing now the search engine has going for it now is that it does not record searches. Useful, as many people seem to value privacy very highly. In terms of its interface, it's simple without any adverts (that I could see), meaning that it loads quickly (I measured it as 0.2 seconds faster than Google). It also carries out searches reasonably fast, although I must say that it seems to value the size of a site over how relevant it is (no matter how specifically I searched, it would not come up with my other blog).

Personally, I don't really mind personalized adverts or anything like that, and the idea that my search history could affect my future is rather distant. I am glad, however, that Google has a bit of competition to keep it on its toes, as Bing and Yahoo always felt somewhat too similar, while DuckDuckGo does have a real difference. I'd better explain a bit about DuckDuckGo's history. DuckDuckGo was created in 2010 by Gabriel Weinburg. The idea from the beginning was to make a simple search engine that had an equally simple privacy policy - no tracking, full privacy. The actual search engine is basically a combination of Yahoo and several other search engines. As I said before, it isn't as good as Google for my purposes, so fortunately there is an alternative. Startpage also provides absolute privacy  it is basically the same as Google. Despite this, it failed to find my blog. Therefore, perhaps simply due to laziness, I'm sticking with Google. If you're really worried about privacy, then just change your Google settings.

For a better look at DuckDuckGo, have a look at this.