Sponsored results, paid placements, related products and services – the unadulterated results of what you’re actually searching for have been pushed a long way down Google’s first page. If you’re sick of wading through the commercials, then Surfshark has got a Black Friday VPN deal for you.

You can hide the ads and barely relevant videos for good with Surfshark’s very own search engine, imaginatively called ‘Search’. It comes with the VPN app for Surfshark One and One Plus subscribers and strips out everything from your search results pages apart from links to the most relevant articles and a separate tab for images relating to your queries.

It’s a bit like Googling in 1999 – before Google Ads, before personalized results, before search suggestions; a long time before AI Overview began dishing out advice of questionable quality. Apart from the fact that Surfshark Search doesn’t rank TechRadar top for ‘best VPN’, we rather like it.

The other nice feature about Surfshark Search is that you can select the country you’d like to search in, using a little dropdown menu.

It generally does the job but it doesn’t stop the site you navigate to detecting your real location from your IP address, and then just serving up the local version of the page.

For example, we still got UK pricing when we went to Surfshark’s store from a US search. Obviously, though, when we switched on the VPN too, and chose a US server, that problem was solved.

Whether Search appeals to you or not, we rate Surfshark very highly. It’s an excellent VPN with a great deal on right now. Take a look at our Surfshark review for more details.