Why Google Search Engine Alternatives
Google is the number one search engine, no doubt about that. It is the most used and preferred search engine; however, many great Google search engine alternatives are available on the internet, which most people don’t know about.
Google is an undisputed leader in the search.
It has captured most of the search market. Right now, Google search engines have more than 91% share of the total search market.
Google provides a personalized experience which costs users sharing their personal information. Moreover, many users blame the Google search engine for tracking them on the internet.
So if you are one of them and looking for google search engine alternatives, you are in the right place.
There are lots of alternatives to the google search engine available. Some of these alternatives provide more privacy than google does.
Most of them don’t track their users. Some of these search engines are as sophisticated as google in terms of technology and services provided.
20 Best Google search engine alternatives in 2023
1. Bing
After Google and Yahoo search, Microsoft-owned bing is the most popular search engine. It is very popular in the United States, and 15% to 20% of its traffic comes from the United States only.
Bing is the second largest search engine and has features similar to Google.
Bing’s homepage has a beautiful changing background, showing famous places, sports, and nature-related images.
Like Google, Bing can also do calculations, display sports scores, translate, spell check, make shopping recommendations, and track flights.
You can also filter results into different tabs like video, images, news and maps
It also shows ads; however, they are more annoying than google search ads.
Search results on Yahoo are provided by Bing search. Bing also has an Android and IOS app. One unique feature Bing has is that it shows the IP address linked to the domain.
In 2022 bing has a 3.2% market share in total internet search its second after google search engine
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2. Yahoo
Yahoo search is older than Google, and it is the fifth most popular search engine after Google.
Yahoo is more than just a search engine. It has email service, games, Yahoo news, online shopping, Yahoo directory, Yahoo groups, etc.
Once, it was bigger than Google. It supports more than 38 international languages. Yahoo also owns Flickr, which is one of the best photo-sharing websites.
Flickr is now integrated with a yahoo search engine. After this integration, yahoo image search improved much. Moreover, yahoo offers yahoo answers and yahoo finance, where you can get so much information on several topics.
Yahoo search is better than Google when it comes to the privacy of the user.
3. Duckduckgo
Duckduckgo is the best Google search engine alternative for privacy. If you are concerned about your online privacy, then the Duckduckgo search engine is for you.
It is very popular because of its privacy policies. This search engine never tracks you; it does not follow you around the web with ads.
It is the fastest growing search engine; it aggregates its result from different sources like Bing, Yandex & more.
Duckduckgo gathers search results from 400 various sources.
It also has its own bots, which regularly crawl web and index web pages, and then display them to the searcher.
Duckduckgo’s source code is open-source, and half of its code is available on GitHub. It has a clean interface and offers all the standard features of any popular search engine.
You can directly search Google, Yahoo, or Youtube from its feature “bang.”
Bang feature allows users to search results from other search engines while staying in Duckduckgo.
For this, you need to start your search query with an exclamation mark! For example, if you want to search youtube, type! Youtube before your search queries
It’s a proxy-based search engine they don’t track user search queries. Duckduckgo only displays one ad a page.
It does not store users’ IP addresses or log users’ information; it only uses cookies when required
You can say Duckduckgo is the best alternative to the Google search engine if you are concerned about privacy.
4. Dogpile
Founded in 1996, Dogpile is one of the oldest search engines; it curates links, images & videos from other search engines like Yandex, Yahoo, Google, and Bing. It’s a metasearch engine.
Dogpile existed before google and once was bigger than google.
With dogpile, you can categorise links, search yellow & white pages, correct spellings, filter your search, and many other great features.
5. Qwant
Launched in 2013, Qwant is France based search engine. Its best feature is that it provides privacy.
Qwant claims it never records search queries and personal data for ad targeting.
Its primary focus is to provide privacy to its users, somewhat similar to Duckduckgo.
It has a user-friendly interface it displays trending news stories on its homepage. If you are a music lover, you can find a dedicated music section here.
In the music section, you can discover new music and lyrics it is integrated with artificial intelligence.
It is available in 13 languages. Bing powers qwant searches. However, it has its own indexing technologies.
With Qwant; you can filter the result based on an interest like news, images, social, music, and maps.
It doesn’t offer a personalized experience as it doesn’t track you like big search engines.
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6. Search encrypt
Search encrypt is another search engine that is an excellent alternative to the google search engine.
It’s a metasearch engine which doesn’t track any of its users. It takes privacy to the next level; it not only blocks online trackers but also encrypts all your searches.
Search encrypt also does not track user history.
It has a feature that auto deletes local browsing history; I like it most. Search encrypts auto deletes browsing history every 30 minutes after the last search.
7. Swisscows
Launched in 2014, Swisscows is a Switzerland-based company. It does not store users’ data. Swisscows use Bing to search for web search queries it gets from the user.
It also has its own index for the german language. Swisscows use Yandex for translation, and the sound cloud powers music searches.
Swisscows is family-friendly; it explicit adult results entirely from search. You can search anonymously using the Swisscows search engine without fear of being tracked
8. Startpage
Founded in 1998 as Lxquick later rebranded as Startpage. It does not track, log, or share your private information with a third party.
It pulls search results from other search engines; apart from that, it provides a proxy service with which you can browse sites anonymously & safely.
Furthermore, it has a feature through which you can browse without setting up cookies; it promotes cookie-free internet.
It’s a safer way to browse and search the internet without fear of tracking, personal data collection and targeting
The company also offers a stand-alone proxy service, which you can integrate into the Startpage search engine.
You can also use their start mail email service with privacy features. It supports 17 languages.
It also has browser extensions which you can install on firefox or chrome
9. Yandex
Yandex is Russia based search engine; its significant market share is from Russia. It’s a leading search engine in Russia, and over 50% of its traffic is from Russia.
Yandex is one of the biggest competitors of Google as it provides similar services like google.
Just like google, it provides cloud storage, email service, analytics, translation, maps & browser, etc., all make it one of the best alternatives to google.
Its search result page also looks like google; you can search images, videos & news.
10. Ask.com
It was founded in 1996 as Ask Jeeves and later rebranded as ask.com. It’s more of a question-answer community than a search engine.
Here you can find answers to a wide variety of search queries.
In the past, ask.com closed its web search entirely, focusing on question-answer-based websites.
However, it includes search results only if they do not find the answer to the question in their database.
It returns search results if you type any query that is not asked as a question.
Search result it is totally dependent on the third party.
11. Lycos
Founded in 1994, Lycos is a web search engine. It also provides email, social networking, Webhosting, and entertainment websites.
Lycos is a subsidiary of Kakao. This company has headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Lycos was one of the first crawler-based search engine and was very popular before google came into existence
12. Ecosia
Founded in 2009, It’s an environment-friendly search engine; you can save the planet by using this search engine. It’s a search engine that plants trees
It has its own solar energy plant for powering every search. This search engine company is based in Berlin Germany
It finances the planting of one tree for every 45 searches approximately. Ecosia donates 80% of its income to reforestation and environmental conservation.
Ecosia supports over 20 tree planting projects in 14 countries like Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Spain, Indonesia, etc.
It has planted over 154 million trees till now. It aggregates all its results from Yahoo. Exosia is available on the web browser, Android, and IOS device
13. Internet Archive
Technically it’s not a search engine; however, it allows the user to search how the websites looked in the past.
You can see how the site looked in the past. Apart from the old version of sites internet archive is an excellent place to find millions of images, books, movies, software videos, etc.
It’s free as it is a non-profit digital library, part of an international preservation consortium.
Internet archive crawls the web and archive all the information.
If you want to access data that are hard to find on Google, then the internet archive can become a great alternative to the google search engine.
14. Wolfram Alpha
Launched in 2009, It’s an answer engine, It answers queries by computing the answer from curated data.
It’s a powerful search engine which curates data, not just by caching web pages. It curates its data from lots of reputed & trustworthy sources
On the home screen of Wolfram Alpha, you can see an example of what this search engine can do for you.
Wolfram alpha provides computational power to your browser where everything works in their backend
Wolfram alpha is not exactly an alternative to google search engine; however, if you need what it does, then it is better than google or like search engines.
Wolfram alpha app is also available for the apple app store, google play store and kindle fire.
15. Discrete Search
It is a search engine which encrypts user searches. It does not track user search history also it uses
SSL to protect user searches and make sure they remain private. They also have a browser extension.
It uses client-side encryption, which encrypts any query made by the user
16. Shodan
Launched in 2009, Shodan lets its user to find computers, servers, routers, and webcams that are connected to the internet.
It’s a search engine for the internet of things. It has servers around the web that crawls the web 24/7.
The main idea behind Shodan is to find devices that are linked to the internet.
With shodan, you can find security cameras, gas stations, smart tv, traffic lights, refrigerators, power plants, etc.
It’s a world-first search engine where you can discover internet-connected devices and explore the internet of things with this search engine.
You can also use Shodan to discover your devices and locations that are connected to the internet
17. Disconnect
This Google search engine is a bit different; it does not display search results on its own page.
Disconnect bypasses your query through its servers and makes it anonymous, then display it in your selected search engine.
It a browser extension, not a search engine.
Disconnect also has various paid plans; if you want advance privacy, then you should definitely check them
Basic protection for desktop and mobile browsers is free
Other notable google search engine alternatives
18. Brave
19. One search
20. Neeva
Conclusion
So this was a list of the best google search engine alternatives; you can still use google. However, I will advise you to try some of these best google search engine alternatives once.
If you know any other search engine that deserves a place on this list, then feel free to comment below in the comment section.
Hi, I`m Devanshu, the man behind bloggingdost.com. I love writing about SEO, WordPress, Blogging, Internet Marketing, Make money online.