Google has become a household name, but it’s far from the only viable search engine. Are there better options? What about privacy concerns. Will Google ever fail? We asked internet marketers to share their favorite search engine alternatives to Google.
Annastasia Kamwithi
Table of Contents
Bing and Yahoo
Bing
This is owned and operated by Microsoft. It is smaller than Google because it is much younger, and was established in 2009.
Features: What you will appreciate about Bing is that it has a better way of indexing content as compared to Google, plus its images, news searches, and videos are also much better organized. Its main features include: home page, images page, sublinks, page searches, and side navigation panes.
When you search, the instant answer will cover finance, sports, flight tracking, dictionary, advanced computation, conversion of units, calculators, etc. You will also find a local information feature that will alert you to local news. This will include traffic updates, hotel listings, people listings, and local restaurants within your area.
Bing rewards
This is one of the main reasons why people use Bing. It is a program that awards users points when they perform searches and complete their daily tasks. It is easy to earn these points, and you can even cash them in for special prizes.
Bing computations
You can easily type in a math quarry, and Bing will automatically give you an answer. The search engine also has a calculator that you can use for your math problems. When you type in very complex math problems, they will redirect you to a place where you can get your answer.
Bing timeline
This is a great new feature on Bing that allows you to type in the name of a famous person, and immediately a timeline showing specific key events in his or her life will appear on your browser, which will save you plenty of time when doing research.
Pros of Bing
It has a beautiful and inviting look. It makes it easy for you to keep track of all your related searches as these are available on the left or right-hand side of your screen. It has a recent search history that you can easily use to jump back to previous searches. It also has an advanced feature that will help you filter the results by the website, region, or even keyword. This helps you get better results, and you can add your current location to get more specific results. It uses Twitter integrated maps for live social media activities near you.
Cons of Bing
The related searches use up a lot of your [screen] space, and it is not as simple [to use] as Google.
Yahoo
This is one of the oldest search engines, and it offers many features that can compete with Google, but it is quite rare to find anyone using Yahoo today. In the last couple of years before the 2000s, everyone was using Yahoo and even had a Yahoo email account. Yahoo is owned by Yahoo Inc., and it was incorporated in 1995 by Jerry Yang and David Filo. Other services that are offered by Yahoo include: Yahoo directory, Yahoo mail, Fantasy sports, Yahoo finance, Yahoo groups, Yahoo video sharing.
Pros of Yahoo
The organic results are the same as those of Bing. The shopping search has more options than for any other search engine. Yahoo answers are very popular with most people. Yahoo has a mobile app that you can download and install on your phone.
Cons of Yahoo
It is not as comprehensive as Google.
DuckDuckGo
The best search engine alternative to Google is DuckDuckGo because it does not track your activity and does not store or collect your data. Another neat feature of DuckDuckGo is that when you try a search, you’ll get the same results as everyone else, which means no targeting results or location-specific results. This feature alone is great for when I am trying to research content online.
Johnny Santiago
Shayne Sherman
DuckDuckGo (again)
If privacy is the top concern, then DuckDuckGo is the best option. They guarantee that they don’t save any information on users or their searches. Since they don’t mine personal data you won’t be selectively targeted by tempting ads using this search engine.
Goodsearch is Yahoo’s search engine with a touch of philanthropy. The profits generated from advertising are distributed to non-profit organizations. Its home page also offers discounts to popular stores such as Target.
Baidu
DuckDuckGo and Baidu are the best alternatives to Google, due to their steady growth in the past years. Baidu is mostly used in Asia, but there’s a high chance that it will earn more credibility in the West. As for DuckDuckGo, they have a strong data privacy commitment in an era when your life is not private anymore when using Google.
Olivian-Claudiu Stoica
Tom Feltham
Ecosia
The best alternative search engine to Google is Ecosia because it invests profit from search ads into projects which plant trees around the world. To date, they have planted over 68 million trees, so using the search engine is making a significant contribution to reforestation efforts around the world.
Yandex
Google is an excellent search engine with algorithms that get updated many times a year with major updates once every year or two. However, in some situations, Google is not the best option when searching for information online.
People in different countries search for different information. They even search for the same information differently. There are local search engines that are optimized for local search queries better than Google. Such a search engine might be Yandex, which was created in Russia.
While it is worse than Google when searching for general information, especially in English, it is better in search queries in Russian, as well as local searches in Russia and neighboring countries. It is also not as minimalistic as Google. On the main page of this search engine, you can see major local news, weather, exchange rates, popular articles and the number of new messages in your Yandex inbox.
Yandex is also better for new websites. Having very good content, you can rank on the first position even without a high domain authority, age, and numerous backlinks. It is also developing its algorithms similarly to Google, but more slowly. So, you can still rank higher on Yandex using old SEO techniques that you can’t use on Google anymore.
Roman Zhyvitski
Jarrod Miller-Dean
One more for DuckDuckGo
Still a new tool and working the bugs out, DuckDuckGo looks promising in its attempts to compete with its predecessors Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Last year, it was the talk of the town for its self-promotion as a “private search engine.” Despite these claims, the young search engine still has a lot to prove, only having 22% of the market.
DuckDuckGo states that it offers data protection and reduces advertising tracking, meaning that it doesn’t display search terms in the user’s history.
DuckDuckGo pulls search results from 400 sources from crowdsourcing and crawls other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. It also provides its own aggregated answers to questions, similar to Googles featured snippets.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t know where its users are coming from, so when typing in a query such as “gas stations near me” it guestimates based on geolocation and IP address. Reports have stated that it’s relatively close to the mark.
The Cons and the Questionable:
With the good, comes the bad. One downfall is that anyone that has access to the user’s computer can view their searches in the browser history.
As far as SEO is concerned, there is still a lot to be done. While DuckDuckGo does encourage only using “quality links,” XML site maps are submitted through Bing Webmaster Tools. Most SEOs will scoff at this. However, the search engine is still young and is building its foundation. The hope is that in the future, it will develop its own tools, in addition to gaining information from more relevant sources.
While DuckDuckGo is no Google, it still has room to grow. After all, Google didn’t become the juggernaut that it is overnight. It had to overcome many obstacles before becoming king of the hill. It will be interesting to see how DuckDuckGo develops. In the meantime, the best way to see how it stacks up against the competition is to explore the search engine itself.
Another for DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo has been making great strides over the last few years and its user experience is second to none. I only use Google to check how our clients are ranking.
The biggest benefit of using DuckDuckGo is the privacy aspect. They have made, and deliver, on promises not to track user behavior. With all the privacy issues from Google over the last few years, this is a viable and safer alternative.
Google is not only tracking searches made on their platform, they are also lurking behind Facebook. Sick of those ads following you around when you have looked at some products online? Then worry no more. DDG cuts these out, so you can browse in peace.
With 1.3 billion searches a month, DDG is growing, and I expect it to absorb more of the market share over the next few years.
Brett Downes
This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.