MevaSearch vs Swisscows: Polish and Swiss private search compared

A Swiss and a Polish search engine

Swisscows is run by Swisscows AG in Switzerland and describes itself as an anonymous search engine. Besides search, the company sells a whole family of products: the TeleGuard messenger, Swisscows.email, Swisscows.VPN and the Edelcloud storage service.

MevaSearch is a Polish search engine created by Igor Oprządek and the WebOrbiton team. It focuses on one thing, search, and is funded only by subscriptions. There are no ads, we do not build user profiles and we do not keep a search history linked to your account.

Where the results come from

Swisscows says the quality of its results rests on its own index and many years of experience in search technology, and in its answers to common questions it mentions a cooperation with Brave. It also offers tabs for images, video, shopping and music, and the results we tested included a news carousel.

MevaSearch also uses Brave. It combines results from the Brave Search API with its own Polish index WebAtlas and Wikipedia, and when you want to see more, it adds results from the independent Mojeek index. For technical, scientific or book related queries, specialist sources appear as well, including Stack Overflow, MDN, OpenAlex, Europe PMC, Zenodo, Open Library, Codeberg and the CIRCL vulnerability database for CVE numbers.

Free with ads or Swisscows Pro

Swisscows is open about how it earns money. In its own words, the free version shows ads delivered by its partner System1, and this advertising is not data secure, because certain usage data has to be processed for it. According to the privacy policy, data sent to advertising partners is anonymised first, for example the last part of your IP address is masked. For people who want full anonymity, Swisscows offers Swisscows Pro, which it describes as storing no data and sharing no data, with no IP address, no history and no user profiles, running on Swiss servers.

MevaSearch has no free version with ads. Everyone gets the same ad free search, and the plans differ only in limits and extras.

Anonymous Preview, a clever feature

One Swisscows feature deserves real praise. Next to each result there is a Preview button that opens a screenshot of the page, taken by Swisscows, so you can see what the website looks like before you visit it. Below the screenshot Swisscows also lists how many trackers it found on the page and whose they are. In our test the preview of youtube.com showed the Google cookie banner and one tracker from Google.

MevaSearch takes a different approach to safety before you click. NetKrypton checks domains for scams and warns you about suspicious websites, results are marked when a link is dead, and tracking parameters are removed from links.

AI

Swisscows shows an AI summary button next to its results. The pages we checked do not say which model is behind it.

At MevaSearch, every AI feature runs on Claude by Anthropic. That covers short summaries above the results, MevaSearch AI chat, which remembers the conversation and cites a source for each piece of information, related searches and photo search. Requests reach Anthropic from our servers without any account details, and under Anthropic’s commercial terms, data sent through its API is not used to train its models. AI answers are included in every plan, from 200 a month on Lite to 3,000 on Pro.

Prices

Swisscows Pro costs 3.50 Swiss francs a month, or 3.17 francs a month when paid yearly at 38 francs. The Swisscows Platinum bundle adds Swisscows.email Premium and Swisscows.VPN Standard for 26 francs a month, or 22.50 francs a month when paid yearly.

MevaSearch Lite costs 4.99 dollars a month and includes 500 searches and 200 AI answers. Plus costs 14.99 dollars for 1,500 searches, 1,000 AI answers and two extra profiles. Pro costs 24.99 dollars and gives you unlimited searches, 3,000 AI answers and four profiles. The Lite plan comes with a free trial of 3 days, and MevaSearch prices include VAT.

To be fair, if you only want ad free search, Swisscows Pro is cheaper. MevaSearch plans also include AI answers, specialist sources and family profiles.

Families and businesses

Family friendliness is one of Swisscows’ core values: it says pornographic and sexual content is neither indexed nor displayed. For companies, schools and institutions it offers a special ad free option on request.

With MevaSearch Plus and Pro you can create extra profiles, each with its own login, and Kids Mode locks SafeSearch at the strictest level and blocks access to payment settings. For businesses, there is a separate plan at 89.99 dollars a month with a shared pool of 9,000 searches, 10,000 AI answers, 10 team profiles and VAT invoices issued by the payment provider.

Where Swisscows is stronger

Swisscows can be used for free, Swisscows Pro is very cheap, and Anonymous Preview with its tracker count is a genuinely useful idea. The strict family filter works for everyone by default, and the company offers a whole set of privacy products from one Swiss provider.

What makes MevaSearch stand out

MevaSearch gives everyone search without ads from the first query, without a free tier that depends on an ad network. On top of that you get AI answers with sources, specialist results for developers and researchers, NetKrypton warnings about scam websites, the option to pin or hide domains, !bang shortcuts, dead link markers and removal of tracking parameters from links. There are also separate tabs for images, videos, news, music and podcasts, family profiles, a plan for businesses and an interface in 16 languages.

Which one should you choose

If you want a free search engine with a strict family filter, or the cheapest ad free plan, and you like the Swiss ecosystem of private apps, Swisscows is a good choice. If you want search that is ad free for everyone, with AI from Anthropic, specialist sources, family profiles and a plan for businesses, MevaSearch is the better fit.

Both treat privacy seriously and both are worth trying. With the 3 day trial of the MevaSearch Lite plan, you can compare them side by side.