Search Engines are now part of our daily life, whether it be carrying out research for Xmas presents, Job searching, or looking for the best Steak House in town. People are now increasingly dependent on search engines to get the answer to their everyday queries.

Search Engines allow us to filter the tons of information available on the Internet and get the most accurate results. And while most people don’t pay too much attention to search engines, they immensely contribute to the accuracy of results and the experience you enjoy while scouring the Internet.

It’s no secret that Google rules the online search world, but other options are available.

Moreover, some of these alternative search engines are hugely popular in their own right – they don’t appear very popular compared to Google.

Some of these alternative search engines seem like ancient relics left over from the birth of the Internet many moons ago.

Others dominate a specific region, such as China, South Korea, or the Czech Republic.

In this article, you will find a complete list of all top internet search engines and a brief exploration of the ins and outs of each. So buckle up, and let’s get started.

#1. Google

The search engine is so popular that it’s many times larger than all of the world’s other search engines combined. With over 84% of the search market share, one hardly needs to introduce readers to Google. However, it needs to head up any list of search engines.

The quality of its search results made Google the most popular and trusted search engine. Google uses sophisticated algorithms to present the most accurate results to users. Specifically, Google currently holds 92.18 percent of the worldwide search engine market share.

The search engine was born in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page; they offered to sell their engine in 1999 to Excite for a whopping $750,000, but Excite rejected the offer. Today, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are worth about $101.48 trillion as of this writing.

These days, Google is far more than a search engine.

The company has developed many other software solutions, such as Google Drive. It owns YouTube, has developed a line of smartphones and laptops, and has even created self-driving cars.

#2. Microsoft Bing

In October 2020, Bing officially rebranded to Microsoft Bing.

Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft’s web browser, they are constantly striving to make it a better search engine, but it’s got a long way to go to give Google competition. Bing replaced MSN Search as Microsoft’s answer to Google launched in 2009. 

Bing’s search engine market share is close to 25.7%. 

Like Google, the search engine filters search results into different tabs such as images, videos, maps, and news.

Unlike Google, Bing’s homepage always features stunning images and news stories.

Although it doesn’t have as many users as Google, Bing still receives 1.2 billion visits per month, so Businesses shouldn’t disregard this search engine.

#3. Yahoo

Although it was once popular and even went head-to-head with Google during its early days, Yahoo has dropped to the third spot in market share.

Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web was the initial name of the website before it quickly changed to Yahoo!, which stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Organized Oracle.”

Yahoo! Mail and other web services helped the business reach a $125 billion valuation in 2000.

But after that, things became worse.

In 1998, Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin attempted to sell their company to Yahoo! for the pitiful sum of $1,000,000.

Yahoo! turned them down.

Then, despite having a huge head start and far more resources, Yahoo! Mail lost to Gmail, Yahoo! Answers lost to Quora, and Yahoo! ‘s Flickr lost to Instagram.

Today, Yahoo! ‘s search engine is powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. So the results from both search engines are very similar.

Yahoo remains in trend for its email services, used by many people In the United States. 

#4. Yandex

Yandex has its roots in a project started by two Russian developers to aid in the classification of patents in 1990 under the company Arkadia.

The term Yandex was adopted in 1993, standing for “Yet Another iNDEXer.” The Yandex.ru domain was launched in 1997.

In 2011, it went public on the New York Stock Exchange with an IPO of $1.3 billion, making it the second-largest at the time (right after Google).

Yandex ranks fifth on this list with a global market share of 1.53 percent.

It’s the most popular search engine in Russia, with 48.84% of total Russian search traffic, followed by Google.

The search engine is also popular in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey.

Yandex provides more than 70 different services, including tools such as Yandex Disk, a cloud-based storage service similar to Google Drive.

#5. DuckDuckGo

If you’re uneasy about targeted ads or don’t want your search data stored, you might want to try DuckDuckGo, which praises itself as “The search engine that doesn’t track you.” It doesn’t track, collect, or store any information, so you’re safe to search for shoes without feeling inundated by subsequent Ngwa’s Shoes ads. It’s worth noting there are still ads on DuckDuckGo — just not personalized ones. 

Unlike what most people believe, DuckDuckGo does not have a search index of its own (like Google and Bing), but they generate its search results using various sources.

In other words, they don’t have their data, but they depend on other sources (like Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, and StackOverflow) to provide answers to users’ questions.

This is a significant limitation compared to Google, which has a set of algorithms to determine the best results from all the websites available on the Internet.

Created by Gabriel Weinberg in 2008, DuckDuckGo continued progressing from 16,413,461 total queries in 2010 to 127,375,308,454 in 2022. In December 2020, DuckDuckGo had 869.1 million visitors, with 48.51% of traffic coming from the US, 6.95% from Germany, 6.37% from the UK, 4.89% from Canada, and 2.73% from France, with an average time spent of 9 minutes, 14 seconds, and a bounce rate of 15.45%.

DuckDuckGo now receives 27.4 million daily search queries, and it’s consistently growing.

#6. Baidu

Baidu was founded in 2000 by Chinese Entrepreneur Eric Xu and is the dominant search engine in China, with over 63.13% market share; in comparison, Google has managed to capture only 3.57% of China’s search engine market. 

This web search delivers results for the website, audio files, and images. It provides other services, including maps, news, cloud storage, and more.

They’re making huge investments into AI, expanding their core offerings in ways very similar to Google, and are now (as of this writing) deploying their computer for self-driving cars (sound familiar?).

Outside of China, Baidu holds little influence. Within the country, Baidu powers 3.3 billion searches per day.

It’s worth noting that China has the “largest and most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world.”

This is often referred to as “The Great Firewall of China.”

So, for Western search engines like Google to enter the Chinese market, they must comply with strict and complex censorship laws and regulations.

Now that you know more about the world’s top 6 web search engines, it is time for you to capitalize on these online opportunities. Among them, Google, Bing, and Yahoo dominate the search engine market and are used daily by most people worldwide. would you consider using an alternative search engine, such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo? Let us know in the comments below!