"Google it" may have become part of the english vocabulary, to mean searching the internet. But do you know that the rate at which your search is being monitored my dampen the integrity of your privacy.
As the web has gotten bigger, the internet search engines too have evolved themselves to cater to various needs of the users. With 63.9 percent market share (as reported by comScore in October 2015), Google still reigns supreme in the market of search engines.
That said, Google isn’t the only search engine out there. Many other players live up to the tasks that Google might not do for you (as you desire). They provide various interfaces, unique features and search algorithms based on unique philosophies.
Knowing the right search engine to make your query means you don’t spend your valuable time browsing through stuffs you don’t need. One could easily get lost in the vast world of internet without proper tools. Here below we present you 15 search engines to try as alternatives to Google for better search results.
1. DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is the first choice for search engines among the users who want to remain anonymous on the internet. While privacy is a highly concerned issued on the internet, DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect your browsing history, social media profiles, emails to give you personalized search results, unlike Google.
Many find DuckDuckGo user-friendly for its features like ‘zero-click’ information (all your answers are found on the first result page), infinite scroll and prompts to clarify your questions. Also the ad spam is much less than Google. If search privacy is your concern, try DuckDuckGo.
2. Blekko
Blekko’s unique interface serves results by category. It uses a thing called “slashtags”- which is a text tag preceded by a ‘/’ slash character, just like “hashtags” in Twitter, to search in its database with the related keywords in categories.
Developed by ex-Googlers, it presents itself as the ‘spam free search engine’. It does log user specific information but deletes it within 48 hours.
3. WolframAlpha
WolframAplha identifies itself as a computational knowledge engine which gives facts and data for number of topics from externally sourced ‘curated data’, instead of caching web pages.
It can do all sorts of calculations, from as simple as addition to complex calculus and statistics. It tends to the needs of the knowledge hungry kid for any kind of knowledge s/he seeks.
4. DogPile
In the 90s, DogPile was enjoying its glory days as the choice for fast and efficient web searching before Google. Now with a growing index and slick presentation, it is once again trying to make its come back in the arena.
It curates information, links, images and videos from other search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex to give helpful crosslink results and offers features like categories, preferences, search filters, recent searches, etc. for better search results.
5. Yippy
Formerly known as Clusty, Yippy is a metasearch engine that brings out the power of many conventional search engines to give a collective result. If you want to explore the deep web, Yippy is your tool.
Deep web pages are harder to locate since they are hosted in private networks and are isolated. Since Yippy provides results in form of ‘clouds’, it is highly likely to locate buried webpages for you which the traditional search methods cannot find.
6. Bing
Bing is arguably the second most popular search engine today with almost 20% market share. It is powered by Microsoft which put everything on its disposal to make it a fair challenger to Google.
It is unlikely that Bing is going to dethrone Google in the near future but Bing has still got almost all the bling that google offers. It is definitely worth a try.
7. Ask
Formerly Ask Jeeves, now Ask.com has approximately 3% of the search market share. Based on question/answer format, it is popular for accommodating the natural, colloquial language.
Most of the questions are answered by other users which are presented in a super-clean list. Besides that, it also has the general search functionality.
8. Mahalo
Dedicated to provide high relevance and higher quality content, Mahalo’s contents are human-powered. It has a committee of editors who manually sift and vet thousands of content.
It obviously means that you’ll get fewer results than with conventional search engines that employ spider robot programs to crawl and index the websites in the web. Mahalo offers regular web searching in addition to asking questions like Ask.com.
9. Adswish
Adswish follows the Google search engine model for classified ads. To bring the most relevant products and services to the users, it provides data-specific search results as per the keyword given by the user for specific product or service in the desired category.
Adwish is that one search engine that promises to deliver just the right product or service online.
10. ChaCha
ChaCha is a lot more like Ask where users can ask any particular question that gets answered by independent contractors called Guides. It provides free and real-time answer to any questions and has a number of quizzes to help the user decide on a number of topics. Alexa ranks it as the eighth most popular search engine.
11. Yahoo
Yahoo used to power its own web search until recently. Now that it has partnered up with Microsoft, it uses Bing search results for its web engine. Yahoo Answers is there for the things that engines like Ask.com andChacha.com do.
Yahoo Finance is by far the best financial news aggregator currently available. Other handy features include travel guide, horoscope, weather report, retail options and handful more, although it is now entirely powered by Bing.
12. Yandex
Yandex is the most popular web search engine in Russia and the fourth largest in the world. Founded in 1997, this Russian based company serves over 150 million search queries per day.
From mail to maps, Yandex provides almost every service that Google does and accommodates multiple languages to facilitate cross lingual searches. Without doubt Yandex, with its vast resources, is one of the best alternatives to Google.
13. Baidu
Known as “China’s Google”, Baidu is the largest search engine in China that facilitates web searching in Chinese language as well as in Japanese. Almost a billion web pages are indexed by Baidu along with more than 80 million images and 10 million multimedia files. That clearly makes it a major player in the search engines industry.
14. Ixquick
Ixquick, like DuckDuckGo, takes privacy issues very seriously. No cookies, no prying into search history, it collects none of the user specific details. Just the thing that Tor browser needs which is why Ixquick is the default search engine for Tor.
For better search results, it makes use of preferences chosen by the user that get deleted after 90 days of inactivity. It is supported in 17 different languages and serves 5.7 million queries per day.
15. The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive lets you trace back time and see what a webpage in the past looked like. For years, it has been taking snapshots of the entire World Wide Web and has maintained an online archive containing millions of images, books, software, movies and much more. Technically, it is not a search engine but it lets users search for iterations of a website in the past.
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