2022-02-15 | 2153 
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There are few people in the world that actually know that we have other search engines on the web apart from the big 5, ie Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Badiu, and Ask. You will be surprised to learn that there are other websites out there that call themselves search engines, and because of simplicity's sake, I will try to explain what a search engine does.
In lame man terms a search engine should be able to execute these three executives which are to discover, crawl and index a specific kind of information and be able to present it to end-users as simple as possible based on search phrases via a property algorithm of a kind. An image illustration is provided below for easy understanding.
If a search engine can not perform these three basic functions, then such a web platform cannot be called a search engine, in fact, to differentiate a search engine from your website search form is the access the search engine has to index millions of websites globally on the internet via their priority robot bot spider.
Now we can have some specific search engine designed for a single function, while we have others that are cross-origin, they search it all...One such search mechanism can be found on Google, which is by no chance the monopoly juggernaut of the search market.
The following listed search engines are metasearch search engines
A metasearch engine is a search tool that uses other search engines' data to produce their own results from the Internet. Metasearch engines take input from a user and simultaneously send out queries to third-party search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, formatted by their ranks, and presented to the users...as quoted by searchengines.fandom.com
Since it is near too impossible for a single search engine to keep indexing the entire web we have other search engines that work in collaboration, sharing resources and reducing the limitations of having every information on the web index. The benefit of this is the idea of having more data results and information at your disposal, as less effort is required to retrieve already shared information. However, this is also a setback to the Metasearch engine, as this reduces the quality or freshness of the data being presented, other issues such as spamming do arise with this technology due to repetitive search result indexing from different sources, but a more efficient rule as been put in place called Fusion, which is aimed at improving the process and functionalities of the Metasearch engine.
There are many types of Metasearch engines available to allow users to access specialized information in a particular field. These include the Savvysearch engine and Metaseek engine.
List of Top 5 METASearch Engines in The World
Private Search Engines are search engines that do not store your queries or track your steps on the Internet and most especially are less advert-oriented.
There’s actually quite a number of them with a range of features and methods to keep your searches safe, they should not be mistaken as doing a search using incognition or VPN browsers. Most of these search engines are also operating as metasearch search engines eg mojeek and duckduckgo, they provide a safe way to search for things that matter to you.
The following listed search engines are private search engines
List of Top 6 Private Search Engines in The World
6 Miscellaneous Type of Search Engines
Find more statistics at Statista
From the statistic it is obvious that Google is the King of Search, but then does it not make sense if the competition is too much to have your website rank on other search engines alike? To be honest, I support the notion of having your site rank on Bing and Yahoo among others can help you target keywords you may not easily rank for on Google, and subsequently, if you do rank on Google there is a higher chance you will be listed on them as well, but it does make sense to speed up the process of indexing via submitting your sitemap URL to these major search engines.
Currently, there are Few Major Search Engines to submit your URL to for quick indexing via their webmaster tools the rest are simply aggregators that feed on these search engines cached results, such search engines are called META SEARCH ENGINES, for clarity sake, I will separate such popular META Search engines from the main search engines, now the top search engines that provide webmaster tools includes;
Now webmaster tools are a great way for any website owner to follow up on their listing on the search engine of their choice and also to get feedback on their indexed pages via sitemap submissions, errors, and solutions to help review their submissions and help the search engine better understand their website and pages.
There are some search engines with more specific functions like indexing only videos, some are web page contents others are images, this kind of search engine does not make use of submissions but relies on simply indexing the web for their priority task.
It is quite obvious that over the decade now that Google has remained dominant and it doesn't seem to want to lose any opportunity in being the first to go place for search queries. One might believe they are the only relevant search engine on the web. As powerful as Google Search is, Bing and Yahoo (Yahoo is now being managed by Bing and they both share their resources to provide better search results and experience to their users meaning they both share the same if not similar search results to their end-users).
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would henceforth power Yahoo! Search in an effort to be competitive in the search industry. As of July 2018, Microsoft Sites handled 24.2 percent of all search queries in the United States. Bing was renamed Microsoft Bing in October 2020 and with the combined effort with Yahoo! Search it is the second most used search engine in the world and is considered as a great alternative to Google.
Global search engine market share held by Bing from January 2018 to September 2021
Find more statistics at Statista
Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in search, but despite their efforts, they still did not manage to convince users that their search engine can be as reliable as Google.
Their search engine market share is constantly low even though Bing is the default search engine on Windows PCs. Bing originated from Microsoft’s previous search engines (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Live Search).
You cannot mention Search Engine history and not have a reference to the once search engine supreme of old times! yep! Yahoo! search was the first to enter the scene (just like they did with the e-mail technology), it will be quite interesting to note that Yahoo worked similar to a search directory that required manual entry of the information (which is what some search engine are still utilizing till date, you will see them in our list soon).
Historically Yahoo approached Inktomi in 2001 to share its searchable index and then later Google in 2002, during this period Yahoo did not own a single index until it purchased Overture Services, Inc. in 2003, which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines during the time.
Subsequently, Yahoo was relying on the Google Search Platform until 2003, which was when it realized Google to be a growing threat to its business prior to their failed attempt to buy off the company in 2002 for $1 billion due to some in-house clearance, by the time all due process was cleared, Google had skyrocketed in shares and value to 3 times their initial offer, which made it one of the biggest missed-out opportunity of the 21st Century.
Recommendation: If you are a webmaster and very much interested in having organic traffic to your site then you might want to consider using the Bing webmaster tool to submit and index your site as well since Yahoo! search utilize Bing's webmaster tool as well, it does no harm to have other search engine referrals from the US, since they have a good hold of things in the US than globally.
Baidu is the fourth most utilized search engine in the world, maybe due to the fact that it's serving the number one most populous country in the world and the Chinese culture seems to be rigid with relying on western influence as seen with the government placing an indefinite blockade on all Google's services, popularly known as the Great Firewall, Baidu clearly takes the lion's share of search marketing in china.
Find more statistics at Statista
From the chart above it is clear that the search engine has superior influence over others even Google is being treated as a beginner in the search market of china, it will be a good assumption to assume the 1.8% and 1.5% coverage in both USA and Japan will be mostly chines end users. This as single out the search engine as one of the top four search engines in the market followed by its persistence dominance regionally and making an effect outside china. At its peak, Baidu hit a worldwide share usage high of 2.25% from January 2018 to September 2021 and currently dropping to 1.75%.
Baidu was founded in 2000 and it is the most popular search engine in China. Its market share is increasing steadily and according to Wikipedia, Baidu is serving billions of search queries per month and is currently the 3rd most visited website in the world as well, need to say it will be a fun fact to actually get listed on this search engine.
The next big shot will be Yandex, the number five on our list
Yandex is the Russian counterpart to Google and going by age, Yandex is much older than Google.
The founders of Yandex – Arkady Volozh and Arkady Borkovsky, came up with the idea of a web search engine software back in 1993.
They named it Yet Another Indexer, which later came to be known as Yandex.
Looking at history, Yandex was the first search engine that was monetized to sell ads.
They started delivering contextual advertisements on the search engine results page in 1998, two years ahead of Google.
Yandex is in very close competition with its US-counterpart Google when it comes to the market share.
The Russian Search engine market share is spread more or less equally between Google and Yandex.
Till July 2019, Yandex had a clear win over Google in Russia.
But the trend started changing since then, with Google taking an upper hand.
Currently, Google has a search market share of 50.6% when compared to 46.83% of Yandex.
Until 2006, Yandex was the most popular search engine in Russia.
Since Google decided to penetrate the Russian search industry, Yandex has been facing intense competition.
The other competitors, such as the Mail.Ru search engine, are almost obliterated by the competition between the two giants. Yandex market share globally is 0.44%
Another worth mentioning is ‘the Google of South Korea’ Naver, the online platform that developed its own search engine in 1999.
It was the world’s first operator to introduce comprehensive search features, such as compiling search results from various categories and listing them on a single page. Naver has introduced a range of new services over the years, starting from news and email to a Q&A platform.
Just as you have some search engines taking preference with their locality eg Lycos for Boston, you have AOL for New York. It was one of the earliest pioneers of the internet in the mid-1990s. AOL maintains its own search engine site, called AOL Search, which was revamped and launched on January 20th, 2005.
AOL Search engine provides users with access to the web, image, multimedia, shopping, news, and local search results. This page focuses mainly on the web results AOL Search provides.
When displaying results from a search, AOL breaks the page down into the following order from top to bottom: Two search bars (top and bottom of the page), Snapshots (if applicable), Sponsored Links, Matching Sites, and Product Results.
Another regional search engine to mention is Seznam, founded in 1996 by Ivo Lukačovič in Prague. it began as a simple search engine and online directory. By 2001, Seznam had developed financial, social, and political news, as well as TV programs, dictionaries, maps, weather forecasts, and more.
The search engine and its web portal are hugely popular in the Czech Republic. In fact, it was the leading search engine there until Google came along.
Today, Google holds 84 percent of the Czech Republic’s market share, leaving only 16 percent to Seznam and others.
Source: Statcounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share
Today Seznam runs more than 15 different internet services and associated brands.
Private Search Google alternatives: Duckduckgo and Ecosia
Find more statistics at Statista
If you’re concerned about the privacy of your data, DuckDuckGo is the search engine that you should be using.
Founded by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, DuckDuckGo has earned itself a name as a non-profit search engine.
If Google highlights the personalized search experience as its USP, DuckDuckGo does the opposite.
It’s known that Google gives a personalized search experience at the cost of taking advantage of your user data.
This is exactly what DuckDuckGo doesn’t do.
It doesn’t collect your data, and as a result, the search results remain the same for you and your friends.
According to the official source, the search results provided by DuckDuckGo are generated from 400 different sources (algorithms), including Yahoo! Search, Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, Wikipedia, and its own Web crawler (the DuckDuckBot), and others.
The search engine crossed the milestone of 50 million searches per day in November 2019, and as of January 2020, they are receiving an average of 51,958,066 queries per day.
The way DuckDuckGo is progressing makes us think about the humble beginnings of Google.
Currently, DuckDuckGo has 86 employees, and they are focused more on giving users organic results than personalized ads.
As of 2020, DuckDuckGo has 0.5% of the global search market share.
However, when it comes to the worldwide market share, DuckDuckGo has managed to get 0.49% more than Yandex and currently is surpassing the Russian-based search engine to take the 6th most used search engine in the world.
Over the years, DuckDuckGo has grown at a steady pace. Recently, this privacy-focused search engine completed 100 billion searches. The Twitter account of the search engine thanked its users for the 100 billion all-time private searches.
Last year, the company announced that they were hitting more than 100 million searches every day. If you check the public traffic statistics page for DuckDuckGo, you will find that the all-time searches have passed 100,440,960,192. The record for the highest daily number of searches so far has been 110,439,133. Needless to say, the search engine is growing in popularity not to mention the redirect of a discontinued metasearch search engine popularly known as yippy.com now redirects to DuckDuckGo.com (Who knows which other smaller metasearch search engines they are acquiring behind the scene).
The reason behind this increased popularity is the growing concern over privacy. Because of this, enterprises like Google and Apple had to block third-party cookies from tracking the users.
Privacy has been the primary focus of DuckDuckGo from the start, and it is because of this that they have managed to reach this milestone.
Compared to Google, this success might seem modest. However, the success of DuckDuckGo has paved the way for other search engines that concentrate on an underserved user base.
Slowly, these search engines are chipping away at Google’s dominance in the search engine market.
Even though DuckDuckGo still has miles to go before it can challenge Google, it may gradually close on other popular search engines like Yahoo! and Bing.
Find more statistics at Statista
Ecosia is an environment-friendly search engine that uses revenues generated from search engine queries to plant trees.
It was founded on 7th December 2009. Typically the Ecosia team plants a tree per 45 searches.
They produce their monthly financial reports so that users can see where the revenue generated from their searches go exactly.
The browser’s servers run on 100% renewable energy and don’t encourage third-party trackers or sell data to advertisers. The search engine is based in Berlin, Germany, hence its popularity in Germany and also France. The search engine is in partnership with Bing for search display queries to its audience.
Conclusion
These are the most popular web search engines on the Internet today from my opinion, this is also to note that we have other search engines and types but will rather focus on the specifics as outlined above minus some worthy mentioning like Wikipedia and Youtube. User satisfaction with the choice of internet search engines research was conducted in 2020 and published by joseph johnson via satista.com noted that mobile search has come a long way, being offered in the form of search apps (Google, Yahoo! Search, and Bing) and internet browsers such as Google Chrome and Safari. According to a September 2020 survey, the vast majority (78 percent) of European mobile internet users reported being satisfied to very satisfied with the choice of search engines available on the internet.
Referencing
On a final note, I will like to give a lot of kudos to the utterly beautiful content written by a set of wonderful writers in the world, with whom's article I was able to use to organize, quote, and reference most of the content in this article.
- https://www.statista.com/topics/7644/search-engines-alternatives-to-google/#dossierKeyfigures
- https://www.stanventures.com/blog/top-search-engines-list/
- https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/czech-republic/#monthly-201902-201902-bar
- https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/private-search-engines/
- https://searchengines.fandom.com/wiki/Metasearch_engine
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
I am a seo web analyst and have a love for anything online marketing. Have been able to perform researches using the built up internet marketing tool; seo web analyst as a case study and will be using the web marketing tool (platform).
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