A manifesto · not a policy
Privacy is not a feature.
It is a precondition for free thought, free organising, and a free press. We built Zest because we refuse to live in a world where curiosity is collateral.
What we do · what we refuse
No ads
Zero ad networks. Zero ad-tech. Zero monetisation of your attention. Search results are the product, never you.
No trackers
No third-party pixels, beacons, fingerprinting scripts, or session replay. The page that loads is the page you see.
No storage
Queries live in volatile RAM and die when the process restarts. Nothing is written to disk. There is no log to subpoena.
No exposure
Your browser only ever talks to Zest. Big-corp CDNs (Google, YouTube, Deezer, news sites) get hit by our server with rotating fake headers — never by you.
Reader proxy
Hit “Read via proxy” on any result and we fetch the HTML, strip every script, and serve it back as plain text. Censored sites become readable. Your IP stays home.
Open source
Backed by SearXNG. Inspect the code, fork it, run your own. There are no secrets, no remote toggles, no telemetry phoning home.
Antifascist
Information is a commons. We refuse to be a chokepoint, refuse to monetise oppression, refuse to make peace with surveillance capitalism.
Solidarity, not engagement
We don't optimise for time-on-page. We optimise for getting you the answer and getting out of the way.
Zest runs on SearXNG, a free metasearch project. Read the live numbers we keep — they're tiny and they reset on restart. If anything here turns out to be untrue, that's a bug. Open an issue, or fork the whole thing. The code is the contract.