Christian Stewart is a privacy researcher and reporter. Follow his latest coverage on YouTube.
These are the most popular search engines on the internet. They all pretty much work the exact same: just type in your search and hit enter. But they all offer slightly different results and features. The majority of internet browsing sessions begin with a search engine, try some of these out to see if you find something new!
Google is the most-used search engine in the world. It processes billions of searches every day. Google’s search engine is available in 123 languages. This search engine collects tons of information from its users and uses it to add features to its search engine results page (SERP).
Bing is Microsoft’s search engine. It has roots in earlier search engines MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing is the second largest search engine in the US market, getting about 20% of the query volume, compared to Google’s 64 percent and Yahoo!’s 12 percent.
Yahoo! was one of the biggest players in the early stages of the internet industry. It is the third largest search engine in the US behind Google and Bing.
Search Encrypt is a privacy-focused search engine that doesn’t track its users’ searches. Private search engines, like this one, minimize the effect of ‘filter bubbles’ that come from personalized search results.
One of Search Encrypt’s key features is perfect forward secrecy, which means when you’re done searching no one will be able to see what you were searching for.
DuckDuckGo is the industry leader of private search engines. Gabriel Weinberg, the company’s current CEO launched the search engine in 2008. DuckDuckGo decided it would stop tracking its users’ search history in early 2009.
It lets users search without sharing their search terms and without targeted advertisements. Because it doesn’t customize search results to each user, DuckDuckGo limits the “filter bubble effect” created by other search engines.
Since its founding in 2000, Baidu has grown a user base of more than 2 billion active users.
Ask.com began in 1996 as Ask Jeeves. This search engine used its own search algorithm until 2010, when it decided it couldn’t compete with big search engines like Google. It now outsources its search results from a third-party provider.
Ask’s toolbar browser extension is criticized for behaving like malware because it is bundled with legitimate program installations and is difficult to remove. However, Ask.com still gets around 100 million global users per month.
StartPage is another private search engine. It began as Ixquick in 1998, but was later renamed StartPage, an easier to spell and more memorable name. With the name change also came a shift to results from Google’s search engine.
StartPage is a good private alternative for people who prefer Google’s search results without the privacy and tracking concerns. It includes a proxy service, privacy-friendly customization, and full HTTPS support.
Yandex is a Russian search engine originally launched in 1997. In 2017, the company’s revenue was over $1.5 billion. It offers results from its main web index and from “specialized information resources, including news, shopping, blogs, images, and videos on a single page.”
In May 2010 Yandex launched Yandex.com, which it uses for beta testing and improving its non-Russian language search.
Infospace provides metasearch and private-label internet search services for online search solutions. It’s main metasearch site is Dogpile, and its other brands are WebCrawler and MetaCrawler.
Dogpile is a metasearch engine that gets results from Google, Yahoo!, and Yandex. It is one of the earliest search engines — it began in November 1995. It currently gets about 7.5 million monthly visits.
WebCraweler was the first search engine to provide full text search. It was bought by AOL in June 1995. It still receives over 6 million monthly visitors.
WolframAlpha is a self-proclaimed “computational knowledge engine”. Rather than answering users’ queries with a list of links, WolframAlpha provides mathematical and scientific answers for their questions.
WolframAlpha is a valuable tool for academic and research purposes, as it provides statistics and definitions for user queries.
Ecosia calls itself the “search engine that plants trees”. It uses the money it earns from ad revenue to plant trees. It currently has over 7 million active users, and has planted more than 28 million trees.
Qwant is a private search engine based in France that “never tries to guess who you are or what you are doing.” Qwant doesn’t track your searches and doesn’t use your personal data for advertising or other purposes. Qwant has a feature similar to DuckDuckGo’s !bangs which it calls Qwick search shortcuts.
As far as search engines go, Qwant is very feature rich. It has the expected web, news, image, and video search. Qwant also has social, shopping, and music searches as well. It has a feature called “Boards” which let users save content that interests them to a sort of mood board.
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