MetaGer is a

metasearch engine A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. ...

focused on protecting users' privacy. Based in

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

, and hosted as a cooperation between the German NGO 'SUMA-EV - Association for Free Access to Knowledge' and the

University of Hannover Leibniz University Hannover (), also known as the University of Hannover, is a public research university located in Hanover, Germany. Founded on 2 May 1831 as Higher Vocational School, the university has undergone six periods of renaming, its ...

History

On 29 August 2013, an English version of MetaGer, known as the MetaGer.net, is available. On 16 August 2016, MetaGer's source code was released on

GitLab GitLab is a software forge primarily developed by GitLab Inc. It is available as a community edition and a commercial edition. History GitLab was created in 2011 by Ukrainian programmer Dmitriy Zaporozhets as a side project written in Rub ...

. On 10th September 2024, MetaGer announced that it would no longer offer the free tier of its service due to a contract termination from Yahoo!, who provided access to Microsoft Bing's search results.

Features

The system is built on 24 small-scale web crawlers under MetaGer's own control. Search queries are relayed to as many as 50 search engines. Their main Web results coming from

Microsoft Bing Microsoft Bing (also known simply as Bing) is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a ...

Mojeek Mojeek ( ) is a UK-based search engine known for its focus on privacy and independence from other major search indexes. Established with a commitment to user privacy, Mojeek operates its own crawler-based index, setting it apart from search en ...

and Brave Search. The results are filtered, compiled and sorted before being presented to the user. Users can select the search engines to query, according to their individual choices among other options (such as "check for availability and sort by date"). Users can create personal blacklists to filter out websites. MetaGer provides access to their services only through encrypted connections. As of December 2013, there is also a

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Toronto, Canada ** Toronto Raptors * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor ...

Hidden Service that allows users to access the MetaGer search functionality from within the Tor network. Since February 2014, MetaGer additionally offers the option to open the result webpages anonymously.

References

External links

* Internet search engines Metasearch engines Tor onion services {{Searchengine-website-stub