On Thursday, a new search engine without ads and trackers debuts in the UK, France, and Germany. Neeva was introduced in the US last year and has 600,000 users there.

Creator Sridhar Ramaswamy, who spent 16 years running Google's ad business, told BBC News that he no longer wanted to be a part of the technology industry because it had become 'exploitative' of people's data.

Trackers exchange data about online behaviour, primarily to target advertisements. Investors have given Neeva $77.5 million (£68 million).

It provides free search but requires a membership for other features including virtual private network (VPN) service and access to password managers.

Users are prompted to register in order to later establish subscriptions. Additionally, Mr. Ramaswamy estimated that the monthly cost in the UK would be around £5.

We believed that the purpose of traditional search engines had changed from helping users to being about advertising and serving advertisers.

'Google has a dominant position in the market, so there isn't much of an incentive for them to actually innovate or develop experiences that are disruptive.The number of adverts merely keeps going up because the corporation feels forced to show its shareholders ever-increasing amounts of revenue and profit.

Both Google and Neeva's first page of results when you search for 'migraine' provide links to accurate information and news items.

The distinction is more obvious when there is a brand, though. When I enter 'BMW,' both search engines display links to the automaker's website and Wikipedia entry as the first results.

Whereas Google continues with a map, social network feeds, and connections to used car dealers, Neeva sticks with various BMW official pages. Although Google has a wider selection, it also overtly encourages me to buy a car.

The trackers installed on visited websites are listed in Neeva's Chrome browser addon. However, none of Neeva's other competitors have been able to challenge Google search's hegemony.

The verbs 'to Bing' and 'to Duckduckgo,' two other privacy-focused services, are not equivalent to 'to google.'

When asked if Mr. Ramaswamy could ever unseat his previous firm, Forrester analyst Steph Liu, who specialises in privacy and search, responded as follows: 'In all honesty, no.'

'It is comparable to the David and Goliath tale. Google has an excessive number of users and revenue.

The final objective is to provide a different option for customers who are concerned about their privacy, don't want Google collecting their data, and don't want advertising to be targeted based on their search history.