Ghostery Private Search

Yes they were, and they used what you personally blocked to better enable ads that would bypass their adblocker. They had some catchy name for it, I don't remember what. When they were exposed for their practices the privacy community did a mass uninstall. These features actually seem good, but I will never trust them again.

I tried to follow the link just to look at it, my firewall blocks it for 'tracking', I could bypass it but once bitten, twice shy.

My thoughts exactly... Hard pass

Ghostery was also intimately involved with what is now Brave Search, IIRC.

Yes. If you use Ghostery and are looking for an alternative I highly recommend Privacy Badger. It's created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is free and open source. Great piece of software.

Yes, but the same as with Startpage. Despite the company, it's privacy features are already valid (GDPR), better as DuckDuckGo, Qwant, and other privacy search engines, the only seach engines without any tracker and/or ads are Andisearch. MetaGer, Mojeek, GetPage, Groot Search and few more, but it's depend of which data is collected to put in risk the privacy, tecnical data are not the same as personal data. Ads and trackers are anyway blocked with the adblockers everybody use, the risk is only the logging of the user activity and this none of the privcy search engines do.

I don't use ad ons from Ghostery, nor the browser, the search engine is in my list good for analyze certain pages, as daily search I use Andisearch, Mojeek, Getpage and Groot, sometimes also LibreY, all these 100% "clean". Addons I use are CanvasBlocker, SiteBleacher and a userscript to show the middlefinger to YT anti adblock. Ad and trackerblocker the inbuild.

I don't trust not even my shadow in the web, but one thing is an online service, like a search engine, and another an installed app.

looking at it it would seem to be getting results via the brave search api

With own Index Andisearch (using AI) and SSuite Groot Search, you can also use a meta search like E-Tools, it use several search engines which you can select.

I don't use pages with paywalls which I can`t skip (very few), cookie walls don't exist for me, they are skipped all.

As a European company, it is obliged to comply with existing privacy laws (GDPR) in order to operate. The necessary income is obtained through the Ghostery Enterprise. Similar to what Proton does, although Proton is OpenSource, they require revenue for the servers for the mail service and the VPN, but they offer these for free without ads or tracking in a reduced form, in mail with the storage limit and the VPN with a reduced number of servers (21 in 3 countries), financed with premium accounts.

There are many methods of creating income on the Internet and they are normally US companies that use the method of surveillance advertising, trafficking in user data, these practices are not used in the EU due to existing privacy regulations and even large corporations have to take care of them. An example is comparing Microsoft's privacy in the US and the EU (where it is not perfect either but light years better)

Microsoft US (Blacklight)

Microsoft EU

Ghostery Private Search analytics Blacklight

Webbkoll analytics (No third party requests out of Ghostery)

https://webbkoll.dataskydd.net/en/results?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ghostery.com%2Fprivate-search

I check the sites, services and apps with several Tools before I use them