Why do search engines use 1st and 3rd party cookies?
What are 1st and 3rd party cookies? Here we cover the basics along with why websites and search engines use them.
Recently, we’ve received a lot of questions about the difference between 1st and 3rd party tracking cookies as well as why certain search engines do or don’t use them.
Before we give our tracking cookie overview, it’s important to state that Startpage does not use 1st or 3rd party cookies on our private search engine. As the world’s first private search engine, founded in 2006, Startpage has never used ANY unique identifying cookies.
Our private search is designed to let people search and browse the Internet without anyone else knowing what they are looking for or are interested in. Rest assured with Startpage, you won’t be tracked by any cookie.
Now let’s define and compare 1st and 3rd party cookies to better understand who is tracking you online and why.
What are 1st party tracking cookies?
A 1st party cookie is created and stored by the website, browser or search engine you are visiting directly. Generally the purpose of a 1st party cookie is to create a profiled and “personalized” experience for users by monitoring and logging their activity.
For example, it would allow a browser or search engine owners to collect customer analytics data, log previous searches, remember language settings and more.
What are 3rd party tracking cookies?
A 3rd party cookie is created by “parties” other than the website or search engine that the person is currently visiting.
For example:
- Cross-site tracking: the practice of collecting browsing data from multiple websites a person has visited.
- Retargeting: using search activity to retarget visitors with visual or text ads based on the products and services for which they’ve shown interest in or previously searched for.
- Ad-serving: making decisions regarding the ads that appear on a website or search engine, deciding when to serve these ads, and collecting data in an effort to inform advertisers on people’s online behavior and ad performance.
Why do some search engines use cookies and why Startpage doesn’t?
Search engines are the gate-keepers of the internet with the ability to aggregate and store some of the largest amounts of personal data possible. A search engine can log a person’s searches about their health status, what products they want to buy, their political interests and any other intimate question a person enters in their search query. In summary, your search engine mirrors a person’s stream of consciousness.
For that reason, Startpage created our private search engine to empower anyone in the world to search without surveillance or a search history. We’ve achieved this by building a search engine that does not use 1st party cookies nor 3rd party cookies.
Startpage’s proprietary “Anonymous View” feature goes beyond search and allows a person to visit and browse entire websites privately. This ensures that even websites outside of Startpage can’t set cookies on you either!
In our humble opinion, all search should be as private as Startpage, but that is not the case.
So… why do other search engines set 1st and 3rd party cookies on people? The short answer is to profit from their users’ personal data either through behavioral ad revenue or selling data to companies who pay top dollar to gather information. For more context, which is always helpful, below is a brief list of reasons why other search engines track people:
- Promote their product to advertisers in order to show how many and what kind of people use their product.
- Report on what links or ads people clicked on to charge or collect revenue from their advertisers.
- Sell people’s personal data and online behaviour to data mining companies or advertisers who are interested in learning about or targeting certain people.
- Personalize people’s experience on their product, remembering their behaviour and saving their settings.
- Learn from people’s activity to make changes to their product and business model.
You have the choice to be tracked or not!
Today it remains that Startpage is the safest and most private way to search and browse online. Each time you search on our private search engine, you are free from both 1st and 3rd party tracking cookies.
How will you choose to search?
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