Can you name 10 search engines off the top of your head? Probably not. Most people really only know Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but there are dozens of search engines out there, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
- Google
Unique monthly users: 1.1 billion
Google is synonymous with search, and it shows. Google far and away dominates the search market. For many, Google might as well be the only search engine, even as the company incorporates more ads in their results and retools their algorithm. What can you do? It's a classic. - Bing
Unique monthly users: 350 million
Bing, Microsoft's search engine, gets a bad rap from it's connection to Internet Explorer, the browser the internet loves to hate. Fans say that if you just change your default browser to Bing for a week, you'll be hooked. It's a speedy search engine, and as a bonus, the homepage is never wasted space--it's packed with content. - Yahoo!
Unique monthly users: 300 million
Yahoo! combines a search engine with a one-stop news source, online arcade, and even video service. Yahoo!'s search returns different results from Google, but since 2009, they've been powered by Bing, so you can expect those results to look about the same. - Ask.com
Unique monthly users: 245 million
Personally, I miss Jeeves, but Ask.com is the modern iteration of that old standby. Ask.com encourages a question-style query, for example, "Why should I use Ask.com?" and refers to their results as "Answers." Ask's biggest asset is the Q&A Community section of the site. - DuckDuckGo
Unique monthly users: 13 million
DuckDuckGo is a relatively new player in the world of search engines. Creator Gabriel Weinberg, 33, built DuckDuckGo as the sort of anti-Google. His goal was to create a simple search engine that delivered quality results without a page full of ads or all of the user tracking. Apparently users are on their side. Although they're not at Google's level yet, they're growing quickly. - Dogpile
Unique monthly users: 10.5 million
Dogpile, established in 1995, is experiencing a recent resurgence. Dogpile is a sort of meta-search engine and compiles its results from scanning rankings from leading search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, to return the best of both. This is important because studies have shown that the same queries across multiple platforms often show vastly different results. - Goodsearch
Unique monthly users: 1.25 million
Want to help change the world with just a click of the button? Goodsearch, powered by Yahoo!, donates money to a cause of your choosing every time you search the web. Want to do a little more? Check out its partner, Goodshop, which connects with retail partners to donate money to a cause when you shop. - Mahalo
Unique monthly users: 5.7 million
Mahalo is not a true search engine, instead, it's a web directory. Instead of using an algorithm, like Google and Bing, it builds connections between information with human editors. Although the human-powered nature of the beast does mean that you'll see fewer results from your queries, they'll be higher quality. - Yippy
Unique monthly users: 100,000
Yippy is a self-described "metasearch" engine, so it's similar to Dogpile, but more thorough. It crawls dozens of search engines and is known for helping users scour the "deep web." It may be a good choice for you if you're interested in an obscure hobby, tough-to-find information, underground news, or even academic research. - Ixquick
Unique monthly users: ?
Although Ixquick has an estimated 5 million queries a month, there's no way to know the number of unique users because Ixquick is a search engine that goes against the data tracking trend. It rejects all tracking cookies, doesn’t report search terms to sites, and doesn’t record any user data. Ixquick also clears your search history after a set time limit, too, to keep your browsing private.
