Google has centered itself as the undisputed leader in the online industry and at least some part of our daily online activity is dependent on Google’s services whether that’s Google Chrome, Google Search, YouTube, or anything else. Probably the most used Google service on the planet is Google search. Google Search has captured more than 92% of the market share which means billions of people are using it on a daily basis. That gives Google too much control and power and it utilizes it by capturing an enormous amount of data on its users. If you don’t want any part of Google, you should use a Google Search alternative. With that in mind, we have created a list of 15 best search engines that you can use as Google alternative.
So, whatever your case might be, if you are looking for a better alternative to the ubiquitous Google Search, here are the 15 Best Google Alternatives.
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
- Search Encrypt
- Qwant
- Yahoo! Search
- Wolfram Alpha
- StartPage
- Yandex
- Dogpile
- Gibiru
- Ask.com
- Internet Archive
- CC Search
- Swisscows
- Ecosia
- Bonus
- Frequently Asked Questions
1. Bing
Although Bing is nowhere as big as it once was, it still remains one of the best Google alternatives on the market right now. Not only it brings tons of features but it also looks good. Bing’s homepage has an ever-changing background consisting of places, animals, people, sports, etc. Some of the key capabilities of Bing include the ability to use operating calculations, quick sports scores, flight tracking, products shopping, translate, conversions, spell check, and more.
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DuckDuckGo is one of the fastest-growing web search engines, which has gained particularly because of its plans on maintaining user privacy. DuckDuckGo aggregates its results from many different sources and it does not keep track of your searches.
Search Encrypt takes online tracking prevention to the next level by not only blocking online trackers but also using local encryption to secure your searches. It uses both industry-standard AES-256 bit encryption along with Secure Sockets Layer encryption for total protection.
Of course, with all these privacy standards, you will not get search results that are as good as Google Search. Still, it’s a viable Google alternative for anyone who is looking for extreme privacy.
After playing trials with different search engines to power their own Web search, Yahoo! have now partnered up with Microsoft to use Bing search results for their web engine. Now powered entirely by Bing, Yahoo! Search provides access in up to 38 International languages.
If you are under the impression that Wolfram Alpha is just for the Math geeks, think again. Although it is primarily a computational algorithm mechanism, it is also a powerful search engine. Wolfram Alpha mainly curates its data, instead of just caching web pages. This search engine curates data from a lot of reputed and trustworthy college publications/libraries, Crunchbase, FAA, Best Buy, and many other sources.
IxQuick was one of the few search engines on the market which showed its own results on the page and didn’t send the query to another search engine. Later, IxQuick launched a second search engine called StartPage which used to include Google’s search results but didn’t allow Google to tracks its users.
It brings a feature called “Anonymous View” which protects users from websites when they click on any search result. If you want privacy but don’t want to deal with sub-par search results, you should be using StartPage.
Yandex is a Russian-based company providing Search and other such services on the web. With over 150 Million search queries operated per day by Yandex, it is one of the largest Web Search engines in the World and the leading search engine in Russia.
Yandex provides its users with lots of services like Images, Videos, Mail, Maps, Metrica (Equivalent of Google Analytics), and Yandex browser; in addition to its Mobile apps, Yandex Disk (Cloud storage), Translate, Market, Money and more.
Dogpile is one of the oldest web search engines to curate information, links, images, and videos from other search engines. Dogpile curates results for your search terms by fetching links from Google, Yahoo, Yandex, and other such services. Although initially, it fetched links from AskJeeves (now Ask.com) and Bing, it has now gone on to add more web engines to fetch links, videos, and images from.
Some of the key features offered by Dogpile include Categories, White pages, Preferences, Search filters, Recent searches, favorite fetches, and more. Dogpile also has its own toolbar for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, which provides users an alternative search from their web browser.
While all of the above Google Alternative services tackled the issue of Privacy, Gibiru takes on Censored content. Do you happen to know that most of the content you look up online is presented after the removal of censored content? Gibiru pulls up all search results, including the ones which are censored for the general audience. While doing so, the issue of privacy is also well-tackled through its anonymous proxy search engine.
Ask.com is still more of a question-answer community rather than a full-blown search engine, but you could find answers to a wide variety of search queries here. While Ask.com closed its doors on Web search in 2009 to become completely focused on its original mission of providing a Questions-and-Answer community, it seems that it is including search results again.
12 Internet Archive
Although technically not a web search engine, Internet Archive does let users search for iterations of a website in the past. You can check how a website looked in the past, of your choice of the selected date.
While CC Search may be relatively new as compared to Google, it’s got all the bases covered to be a good bet. What makes it a competent alternative to Google is a reliable platform for exploring copyright-free content. So, just in case you find Google unable to live up to your demand in terms of offering copyright-free music, videos, or images, it would be worth taking a look.
14. Swisscows
Whether you aren’t satisfied with the privacy policy of Google or are hunting for a privacy-centric web browser, Swisscows would be a trusted contender for your needs. Touted to be a family-friendly and semantic search engine, it allows you to surf the web with enhanced privacy.
15. Ecosia
If all you want is a simple and lightweight Google alternative, Ecosia would be a decent substitute. It has a clean appearance and offers search results with fairly good accuracy. Just like Google, Ecosia also saves your activity to offer more personalized search results. However, if you don’t want the search engine to save your activity, you can choose to disable the personalized search results.
Bonus:
1. YouTube for Video Search
While a lot was talked about web search engines, where you enter a text manually, Google’s YouTube is by far the most popular website for searching videos on the web. The second-largest search engine on the web, only second to Google, YouTube has the biggest collection of videos. You may also look into other Video search alternatives like Yahoo View, Facebook Watch, Vimeo, and more for your Video searches.
For Reverse searching of images, that is, to search for content by uploading an image, TinEye is one of the best services. You can also find some alternatives to TinEye by visiting our best reverse image search engines and mobile applications article.
Out of the services listed above, many of them do offer their own standalone mobile applications. You can make use of these applications to search directly from your mobile application. You can find both Android and iOS mobile applications for DuckDuckGo, Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo! Search, Bing, Yandex, Ask Mobile, Dogpile, and more.
What is the Best Alternative to Google?
Both in terms of accuracy and intelligence, Bing appears to be the best alternative to Google. Though DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! Search have also got the features to stand out.
Is There Another Search Engine Other Than Google?
As we have mentioned in this roundup, there are several search engines in the markets. As Google dominates the sphere with more than 90% market share, many people believe that Google is the only search engine in the market.
No. DuckDuckGo was founded by Gabriel Weinberg – an entrepreneur who had previously launched Names Database. The company is located in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (United States).
Most web browsers allow you to change search engines. So, you can easily switch to other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! Search, if you don’t like Google. For instance, if you want to use other search engines in Google Chrome, click on More -> Settings. Now, click on the down arrow next to the Search engine and then choose a preferred search engine.
Well, the straightforward answer to this question is – No. When it comes to offering fast and accurate search results, Google is by far the best in the business. However, on the security and privacy front, DuckDuckGo has a clear edge over Google.
