Which are the 10 best and most popular search engines in the World? Besides Google and Bing, there are other search engines that may not be so well known but still serve millions of search queries per day.
It may be a shocking surprise for many people, but Google is not the only search engine available on the Internet today!
In fact, there are a number of alternative search engines that want to take Google’s throne but none of them is ready (yet) to even pose a threat.
1. Google
No further introduction is required. Google ranked first in search with an astonishing 88.28% gap, and 88.28% behind Bing, which came in second.
According to statista and statcounter, Google dominates the market in all countries on any device (desktop, mobile and tablet).
Why is Google the most popular search engine?
What makes Google the most popular and trusted search engine is the quality of its search results. Google is using sophisticated algorithms to present the most accurate results to users.
Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came up with the idea that sites referenced by other sites are more important than others and therefore deserve higher rankings in search results.
Over the years, Google’s ranking algorithm has been enriched by hundreds of other factors (including the help of machine learning) and remains the most reliable way to find exactly what you need on the Internet.
2. Microsoft Bing
Update: Bing changed its name to Microsoft Bing in October 2020.
The best alternative search engine to Google is Microsoft Bing. Bing’s search engine share ranges from 2.83% to 12.31%.
Bing was Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in search, but despite their efforts, they still couldn’t convince users that their search engine could be as reliable as Google’s.
Although Bing is the default search engine on Windows PCs, their search engine market share has been low.
Bing is derived from Microsoft’s previous search engines (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Live Search) and is the 30th most visited website on the Internet according to Alexa ranking
3. Yahoo
Yahoo is one of the most popular email providers, and its web search engine ranks third in search with an average market share of 1%.
From October 2011 to October 2015, Yahoo Search was powered entirely by Bing. In October 2015, Yahoo entered into an agreement with Google to provide search-related services, and until October 2018, Yahoo’s search results were powered by Google and Bing.
As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is again exclusively powered by Bing.
Yahoo is also the default search engine for the Firefox browser in the US (since 2014).
Yahoo’s portal is very popular and is the 11th most visited website on the Internet (according to Alexa).
Baidu’s global market share ranges from 0.68% to 11.26%.
Founded in 2000, Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. Its market share is steadily growing, and according to Wikipedia, Baidu serves billions of search queries per month. It is currently ranked #4 in the Alexa ranking.
Although Baidu is globally accessible, it is only available in Chinese.
5. Yandex.ru
Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia, with a global market share between 0.5% and 1.16%.
According to Alexa, Yandex.ru is one of the 30 most popular websites on the Internet and is ranked 4th in Russian.
Yandex positions itself as a technology company with smart products and services powered by machine learning.
According to Wikipedia, Yandex operates Russia’s largest search engine, with about 65 percent market share in the country.
DuckDuckGo’s search engine market share is about 0.66%.
According to DuckDuckGo’s traffic statistics, they serve an average of 90+ million searches per day, but their overall market share is still consistently below 0.6%.
Contrary to what most people think, DuckDuckGo doesn’t have its own search index (like Google and Bing), but they use a variety of sources to generate search results.
In other words, they don’t have their own data, but they rely on other sources (like Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, StackOverflow) to provide answers to users’ questions.
This is a big limitation compared to Google, which has a set of algorithms to determine the best results for all available sites on the internet.
On the positive side, DuckDuck Go has a clean interface, it doesn’t track users and doesn’t fully load ads.
7. Ask.com
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, gets about 0.42% of the search share. ASK is based on a question-and-answer format, where most questions are answered by other users or in the form of votes.
It also has general search capabilities, but returns poor quality results compared to Google or even Bing and Yahoo.
Ecosia is a Berlin-based social enterprise founded in 2009 by Christian Kroll. The main reason for creating ecosia is to help fund tree planting and restoration projects. Hence the name “tree planting search engine”.
How does Ecosia work? Ecosia is a Bing partner, which means its search results are powered by Bing. Ecosia supports tree planning by showing ads in search results. Every time an ad is clicked, ecosia gets a small share. It is estimated that it takes about 45 searches to fund the planting of a tree.
In terms of search engine market share, Ecosia’s share is about 0.10%.
9. AOL.com
The once famous AOL still ranks among the top 10 search engines with a market share of nearly 0.05%.
The AOL Network includes many popular websites such as engadget.com, techchrunch.com, and huffingtonpost.com. On June 23, 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications.
10. Internet Archive
archive.org is an Internet archive search engine. You can use it to see how your website has looked since 1996. It is a very useful tool if you want to track the history of your domain and check how it has changed over the years
Best Search Engine Videos
Which is the Most Used Search Engine
Start page
StartPage was founded in the Netherlands in 2006. They advertise their company as the most private search engine in the world. Startpage protects users’ privacy by not allowing tracking systems to record users’ searches.
When executing a search query in Startpage, you can choose to select specific regions for results, set family filters, and configure many other settings without logging in.
Wiki.com is a specialized wiki search engine. You can choose between all wikis, Wikipedia only, encyclopedias, or wikis submitted by others.
Results for wikis are powered by Google and are wiki-only. If you want to look up specific content in Wikipedia or other popular wikis, you can do it faster with wikis.
YouTube is the most popular video viewing platform and the second most popular search engine in the world. YouTube has more than 2.3 billion active users worldwide.
Many of these users turn to YouTube first, rather than any other search engine, when looking for answers or information on the web. It is estimated that YouTube handles more than 3 billion searches per month.
WolframAlpha is different from all other search engines. They market it as a computational knowledge engine that can give you facts and figures on many topics.
It can do various calculations, for example, if you enter “mortgage 2000” as input, it will calculate your loan amount, interest paid, etc. based on some assumptions.
CC Search is a web search engine that enables users to find content they can reuse. All content in the CC Search Index is licensed under Creative Commons.
Currently, only images are included in their index, but they plan to add open text and audio.
These are the most popular web search engines on the Internet today.
This list is by no means complete, and more will definitely be created in the future, but as far as number one goes, Google and Bing will maintain their lead for years to come.
