Search without being the product.
Zest is a private metasearch engine. It asks many search engines at once, removes the tracking, and gives you the results. There are no accounts, no profiles and nothing to sell.
How a search works
- 1You search
Your browser only ever talks to Zest. No third-party scripts, no ad tech.
- 2Zest asks the engines
Our server forwards the query to SearXNG instances, which query Google, Bing, Brave, DuckDuckGo and others on our behalf.
- 3Results come back clean
Images, favicons and thumbnails are fetched through our proxy, so sites never see your IP address.
- 4Nothing about you is kept
Results are held briefly in a cache so repeat searches are instant, but never linked to you. History and settings stay in your browser.
What you can do
Start a query with !w, !gh, !yt and more to jump straight to that site.
Open any result as plain text with scripts and trackers stripped.
Searches first, then answers with numbered sources. Research only.
YouTube results play through Invidious or YouTube's no-cookie player.
Hide sites you never want to see and choose which engines count.
Press / to search, j and k to move through results, Ctrl K for everything else.
Meet Hoodini
The hooded mascot keeps an eye on things and answers questions in the Ask tab. Hoodini runs on free AI tiers, reads the search results before answering, and sticks to research. Ask about a topic, not for code.
Support Zest
Zest has no tracking and no investors, but the servers aren't free. Donations and a small number of clearly labelled, optional ads pay for hosting and search capacity first. Anything beyond that goes into a better Hoodini: right now it runs on free AI tiers with shared limits, and funding is what would let it answer faster, more often and more accurately.
Every amount helps. Using Zest stays free either way.
Ads and featured links
Servers cost money, so Zest may show a small number of ads and featured links. We only advertise three kinds of things: our own projects, a hand-picked selection of other people's projects that fit what you searched for, and ads from networks we have vetted. BuySellAds is the one we plan to work with. Our promises:
- We only run ads we stand by. An advertiser or network that breaks these promises is removed.
- They are always labelled, and never styled to look like search results.
- They never use your searches, history or any profile of you, and nothing follows you around the web.
- No tiny or hidden banners, no pop-ups, no autoplay, nothing designed to grab your attention.
- You can switch them off in Settings. Ad blockers are fine too; we don't block them.
- Every ad has a Report link. You can also report an inappropriate ad or contact us any time.
We count how many times each ad is shown and clicked, as one daily total per ad. Nothing about you is stored with those numbers, and the text of your search is never kept. Ad images are served by Zest itself, and Zest loads nothing from an advertiser until you click.
Data sources and credits
Zest's answer cards use open data. Thank you to everyone who publishes it.
- Weather: MET Norway, licensed CC BY 4.0. Zest converts and summarises the data.
- Places and maps: © OpenStreetMap contributors, using Nominatim and the OSM tile servers, fetched by Zest so your browser never contacts them. Time zones: tz-lookup (CC0). Video channel details: YouTube oEmbed.
- Films, people and facts: Wikidata (CC0), Wikipedia and Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0). Photos from Wikimedia Commons, each credited on its card under its own licence.
- TV shows: TVmaze (CC BY-SA 4.0).
- Currency: European Central Bank reference rates, and Exchange Rate API for other currencies. Crypto prices from the public tickers of Kraken and Coinbase. Stock quotes from Finnhub, Yahoo Finance and Alpha Vantage. Sports from TheSportsDB.
- Songs and previews: Deezer. Lyrics: LRCLIB, a community database. Lyrics belong to their rights holders.
- Command-line examples: tldr pages (CC BY 4.0). Other coding examples are written by Zest.
- Word suggestions: the Datamuse API. Search itself is powered by SearXNG.
Who made this
Built by Tay März on top of SearXNG. Read the privacy manifesto, check the status page, or get in touch.