One of the most essential tools for CPA firms and business professionals, is the Internet.  
Accountants use the Internet for retrieving, communication, processing and storing data. Identity and data theft are huge issues in today's world. The IRS Security Summit has recently started multiple campaigns to better protect taxpayers and tax professionals.  
  
There's even been cyberattacks on large firms such as Deloitte. The Utility of Search Engines Without a doubt, Google is the most used search engine in the United States. But for those who might be concerned with Google's privacy policy, there are a few good alternatives for professionals which are worth looking into.  
Some of them even make a specific focus on privacy, in addition to striving for good quality of search results. What are search engines? They are simply websites that store data from other sites. Users use a browser of their choice to navigate to them. The relevance of the results a search engine provides determines its usefulness.  
  
Recently, testing has been done to determine the most useful search engine for accounting practice. Below you will find all the search engines that were included in this test. It scored their ability of generating useful results on accounting topics when compared to a "control" search on Google.  
The chosen topics were revenue recognition, kelly madison lease accounting, qualified business income deduction, non-GAAP measures, and Internal Revenue Code (IRC) section 199A. Best results were considered those that included professional journal articles, hope pages for SEC, FASB, zooskool IRS and other regulators or standards setters.  
  
Bing The second most popular search engine in the U.S. is Bing, which is Microsoft's way of competing with Google. The most popular email provider is Yahoo, which actually uses Bing, making it's usage higher. For users of Word Online, OneDrive and other online versions of Microsoft Office tools, Bing makes a wonderful alternative, since they can access their accounts from Bing's homepage.  
  
The search results generated by Bing were good and included government agencies, professional bodies and publications. Suggestions for related searches was also good. Same as Google, Bing generated a lot of Wikipedia or Investopedia links and advertisements for commercial sites.  
DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo, is all about privacy. It doesn't track users, store their personal data, nor target advertisements to them. DuckDuckGo uses Bing and nikki benz other search engines to generate results while giving anonymity to the user. The search results did lead with advertisements (this was the only search engine to do that), as well as Wikipedia or Investopedia links.  
  
It didn't offer any optional search terms but it did retrieve the best variety of on-point results. Overall it provided good results from from professional sources, nikki benz even a few that Bing didn't capture. StartPage StartPage also advertises itself as "the world's most private search engine." It used to be known as "IxQuick", a search engine that used Google without Google's tracking.  
  
From the three search engines tested, StartPage and DuckDuckGo were the most security conscious. Startpage provided the best results view when using mobile devices. Final Comparison When comparing the three reviewed search engines, the largest number of results were returned by DuckDuckGo.  
StartPage and Bing both produced interesting professional accounting research results. Their mobile versions were even easier to use than the desktop-based versions.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
This article was written with assistance from