Does anyone have a recommendation for another search engine that does decently well in terms of privacy and also supports chinese results?
Edit: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic... This gives additional information. Apparently they are showing ads that are only related to the search terms. I guess they are showing more ads than Google? Otherwise this wouldn't really make sense. Or maybe individualized advertisements in the search results aren't that much of a big money-maker for Google (!)
Really the only way to compete against Google from a feature perspective is the privacy angle. You're sacrificing better click through rates to target a market that cares about privacy. Making something private requires a lot less engineering and product power than hyper optimizing tracking. By definition if you're not doing any tracking you don't need to employee people to set up tracking systems.