Top 18 Best Search Engines in 2023: Alternatives to Google

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Best Search Engines list 2023
Ultimate List of Best Search Engines

Looking for the list of best search engines in the world?

In this article, we test & list the best internet search engines and popular alternatives to Google.

Not only that, we’ll show you how you can leverage and benefit by using these popular search engines (both for efficient search results and for getting paid to search online).

Today, every single query that your idle brain can think of is answered by search engines within the blink of an eye.

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From getting your daily dose of current news to the weather forecast, from getting information about the nearest local businesses to trusting Google better than grandma’s tips, search engines have come a great way.

No wonder, Google has become the de facto assistant for everyone and with a whopping 78.78% market share, Google truly has been the best search engine in the world.

Top search engines according to net market share graph

However, things aren’t always the same and Google has been decreasing the organic click-through rate in favor of paid ads.

Most commercial queries now turn up with a full page of paid ads (that too with green font color just like organic results) and users see no more organic results without having to scroll further down. While this is not a big deal for regular users it surely is for publishers and bloggers.

Related Reading:

What’s worse is, almost 70% of teenagers don’t recognize the difference between organic results and paid ads.

And brands now see a 25% drop in desktop search CTR which gigantifies to a 55% drop in mobile search CTR (source) no matter what SEO techniques you use.

As a digital marketer, that hurts (Yikes!)

You now have to pay to play or leave the game at the mercy of left-over CTR.

That being said, not all is over yet.

You can make over the loss from Google’s over-commercialization by focusing on other popular search engines we have.

In today’s article, I list the top best search engines that are perfect Google alternatives that can make up for Google.

This list of best search engines for 2023 would be incomplete without the definition of search engines. Here is what a search engine is:

For example, image search engines display image results on the SERPs while video search engines display video results.

Search engines index and display information as webpages, images, videos, PDFs, and other media formats. Unlike web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines leverage complex algorithms and search bots to index, rank, and display results in real-time.

Brief History of Search Engines

While the foundation of the internet and search engines was laid way back in 1945 with the article published in The Atlantic titled As We May Think, where Vannevar Bush suggested creating a body of knowledge for mankind, the real first search engine Archie was launched only in 1990.

What Are the Uses of Search Engines?

You can use search engines to:

  • Search for information about a query
  • Search, and download images of almost anything
  • Educate yourself, kids, and literally anyone
  • Research on any topic for office, academic, or any other use
  • Get a solution to any problem you might have
  • Look up and find places of business (like restaurants, repair stores, salons, and literally any other place of interest
  • check for weather, currency conversion rates, and similar information
  • check for movie release dates, information about famous people, movie reviews, job vacancies, lyrics of your favorite songs, etc.
  • Optimize your website and drive relevant traffic to it
  • Make money blogging

In this article…

…we’ll cover the list of the top 18 best search engines (because all those humongous top 50 search engines type of posts often list search engines from pre-historic times that are no longer relevant).

On to the list…

1) Google: The Biggest Search Engine by Market Share 2023

Google: Best Search Engine In The World

Founded in 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google has become the largest and most popular search engine in the world.

Why is Google the best search engine?

With a net market share of 78.78%Google definitely is the best search engine in the world.

The second close competitor and Google’s alternative search engine, Bing has only a mere 7.65% market share.

The Google-owned search engine is so good that the term “Google” has become synonymous with searching. People just say “Google it” instead of saying search it.

According to the latest SEO statistics, Google processes over 40,000 searches per second which roughly sums up to 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. These searches range from anything you can imagine to everything that can be asked.

Google search queries range from news to weather forecasts, business and marketing trends, lifestyle queries, maps, directions, and everything in between. Google now taps into voice search and more interactive queries with Google assistant which is reshaping the way how search works.

This makes Google eat up the lion’s share in search engine marketing and ad revenue. Google’s search engine earns billions of ad revenues and other income sources for its parent and umbrella company, Alphabet.

Last year, Google reported a net profit of $26 billion in revenue from the ad business which was 26% more than a year ago.

What’s in It for You? (How to Use Google for Your Benefits?)

Since Google is so big and gets in front of literally every person with an internet connection, brands and businesses like yours are leveraging it to get in front of those users and profit.

Websites and blogs (like this one) too, leverage this to get in front of readers and run a business by selling them ads, products, services, courses, and so on.

If you want to dive into this profitable laptop lifestyle, here’s a step-by-step guide to starting a blog and making money online.

If you already own a blog or business (online or offline) and want to optimize Google to rank yourself on the first page of Google, tap its users to gain exposure and sales, here’s a guide to the latest on-page SEO optimization techniques that helped me increase my website traffic by 378% and double my blog income in a few months.

Google supports and patrons billions of businesses, help people find direction, and tons of other things (that’s for another blog post) that’s why Google is the best search engine.

Looking for the best resources to optimize for Google and get more traffic and sales?

View resources to get started with Google » 

Let’s now head on to search engines other than Google…

2) YouTube: Largest Video Search Engine 2023

Youtube: Best video search engine and Second largest search engine

Interesting as it may sound the #2 best search engine and the top Google alternative is YouTube, a product owned by Alphabet, Google’s umbrella company.

But…

Is YouTube A Search Engine?

Yes, YouTube is a search engine but for videos. In fact, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, after Google.

Founded in 2005, YouTube is transforming the way people are accessing information across the web. If you focus on video content, may that be entertainment, news, or tutorials of any sort, YouTube is something you should be focusing on.

YouTube- Best video search engine infographic

YouTube, with 1.5 billion active monthly users (which equals a jaw-dropping ⅓ of total internet users) is the second-largest search engine and the largest video search engine in the world.

You heard it right, YouTube is the largest & best video search engine that has answers to any video query you might have.

YouTube as a search engine is bigger than Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask.com combined.

If you’re still not convinced that YouTube is a good video search engine, you’d love to know that people consume over 1 billion hours of video every single day.

With such traffic and active user count, YouTube is definitely something worth focusing on to drive traffic back to our site. You can also create an account, open up a vlog account on YouTube and start vlogging and directly leverage the audience to gain exposure, make money vlogging, and add value to the community.

3) Bing: Best Alternative to Google

Bing Search Engine: #2 Best Search Engine

Launched in 1998 by Microsoft, Bing is now the second-largest web-based search engine and the third-largest search engine after Google and YouTube generally.

Bing, is also the second most popular search engine in the US after Google, which makes it very lucrative if you want to target an audience in that niche.

Bing brands itself as the “decision engine” by virtue of which it displays rational results based on users’ queries unlike other search engines (read Google) which display results by just scanning and matching the text.

Bing is also a better video search engine than Google giving you a better layout and play-without-leaving Bing.

This does make Bing the top contender for being the best video search engine in 2023.

Another advantage of using Bing over Google is Bing rewards, which rewards you with some points every time you search on their search engine (yes! Bing is perhaps the only search engine that gives you cash rewards for using their search) which can be redeemed when shopping on Amazon, Starbucks etc.

If you didn’t know, 72% of the business and finance searchers are not found on Google, that’s approximately equal to 21 million people you wouldn’t want to miss.

Furthermore, what makes Bing one of the most popular search engines is its collaboration with Yahoo! web search forming the Yahoo-Bing Exclusive network that makes up a decent market share you wouldn’t want to be missing.

With over 15 billion searches, Bing’s search engine is something you would want to optimize your blog/website for.

According to Comscore, Yahoo Bing network searchers spend an average of 6.8% more money online than Google searchers.

If you’re into digital marketing and looking for an alternative to Google search engine, you probably will be amused to know that Bing is not only one of the most popular international search engines but also great in terms of marketing ROI.

While there will be ongoing debates as to which is the best search engine and wars declared on Google vs Bing, you should always consider having your hands in both pies. If you’re looking for a search engine other than Google, Bing is what you should be using.

4) Baidu: Best Search Engine in China 2023

Baidu- best search engine in China

Baidu is amongst the best search engines that rightly deserves to be on our list of best alternatives to Google in the world. It tops in market share for international search engines list.

While Google rules the US search engine market, Baidu is the undisputed winner of the search engine market in China with over 82% market share (Google China, owns only a 10% market share, far from what Baidu does).

China which has over 721 million active internet users (which is the largest for any country in the world) also makes up for a quarter of total internet users in the world.

And, owning an 82% market share in such a country makes Baidu definitely the most popular web-based search engine and Google alternative in China.

Baidu also invests heavily in AI, automated cars, and other technological stuff and it clearly is one of the best examples of search engines that expand beyond the search market.

If you’re from China or someone whose business is related to the Chinese market you should definitely consider leveraging Baidu as a local Chinese search engine.

The reason being it understands the local language and is better optimized for the Chinese audience than Google China (Baidu’s competitor in China).

And, the fact that Baidu is one of the best search engines not powered by Google is like icing on the cake for a country that wants to safeguard its privacy.

Other than the domination of the Chinese internet search engine market, Baidu hasn’t a significant position in the search engine space globally.

5) Pinterest: Best Image Search Engine 2023

Pinterest: best image search engine
Best image search engine (alternative to Google image search)

Next on our list of best search engines is Pinterest which is by far the most popular image search engine in the world.

With over 2 billion monthly searches, Pinterest has been the best image search engine in the world and one of the main competitors of Google’s image search engine.

Pinterest is more technically equipped and AI-powered to find better images based on both searches and similar image options via its lens app.

YouTube video

Pinterest is also called “the accidental search engine” as is proved by stats that say 47% of people just accidentally “happened upon” the pins they repinned or bought from while 28% of Pinterest users revealed that they were searching for the item they repinned and purchased.

This shows that if you optimize your pins and brand good enough for Pinterest’s search technology you’ll get access to over 150 million Pinterest users that spend an average of 98 minutes per month on the image search engine.

Pinterest, the image search engine has great potential for brands that deal with arts and crafts, fashion and beauty, health, home-making, education, you name it.

Related searches (or pins), a personalized news feed, and custom search features all make Pinterest’s image search engine a strong competitor and alternative to Google’s image search engine.

You should definitely consider using Pinterest search to grow your Pinterest followers magically.

6) Yahoo! Search: The Pioneer of Search Engines

Yahoo search engine

Yahoo started as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, a list of websites curated by Stanford University students Jerry Yang and David Filo, and became an internet giant and a household name for search engines in no time.

Yahoo search today, according to NetMarketShare is the fourth largest search engine in the world and the third largest search engine in the US.

Yahoo has also been a strong player with an extensive user base in the sports, news, and finance sector and is still one of the top 5 digital media properties in the US market.

With lots of ups and downs, Yahoo was recently sold to Verizon for a hefty sum of $4.83 billion (this is a fraction of what Yahoo was worth in 2000, though).

Speculations are, this deal will further power Yahoo search (or whatever revamped brand it might come up as) because Verizon (the new owner of Yahoo) has AOL search in its portfolio which is already a popular search engine.

Yahoo sites, with 206 million monthly unique visitors, are the third most popular digital properties after Facebook and Google sites in the United States. AOL, on the other hand, is in the 7th position with sites like Huffington Post, Engadget, and TechCrunch in its portfolio.

Stats about Google Facebook Yahoo Aol sites digital properties

When these both combine, they will be almost double what Google and Facebook-owned properties are in the US.

Yahoo! Search also has one of the best search engines for videos, Yahoo Video Search, that lets you browse and surf through videos they create, plus video content from other platforms like Google’s YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, MySpace, Hulu, and similar video content creators based on your query.

7) Ask.com

Ask.com

Surprising as it may sound Ask.com, formerly known as Jeeves, has a 0.16% market share in the search engine industry.

Ask.com answers query to general questions and aren’t one of the best search engines but it definitely is a popular web search engine considering its 0.16% market share (which isn’t a small feat).

Ask.com is a bit of a buggy search engine that receives its fair share of criticism from users but that hasn’t proved fatal in its growth.

And of course, as marketers, Ask.com is a great search engine to find keywords and related LSI keywords, and see what people are asking in real-time, in the real world scenario.

You should definitely consider having Ask.com in your search engine marketing or SEO arsenal and leverage it for your website/blog’s growth.

8) AOL.com

AOL search engine

AOL is still one of the most popular and rightfully deserving best alternative search engines to Google.

The numbers show AOL has a net market share of 0.04% of the entire search engine industry. Even now, 2.1 million US users use AOL’s dial-up internet service.

With Yahoo’s acquisition of Verizon, the parent company that also owns AOL, AOL is believed to become even more efficient in search engine techniques and market shares.

9) DuckDuckGo: Best Anonymous Search Engine

DucuDuckGo best anonymous search engine
Best search engine for privacy protection

DuckDuckGo began only in 2009 but it has carved a name and reputation as the best private search engine in the world.

If you are looking for a search engine that doesn’t track your history, or search queries and is completely safe, DuckDuckgo is your thing.

DuckDuckGo has a great instant results feature and with their community site, DuckDuckHack, you can actually go create instant answers for their queries. This is a great feature that you can ultimately use for more exposure.

The DuckDuckGo app is ranked as Times Top 50 Apps for IOS that lets you read stories and interesting results of the day. Quite a good potential to get in front of such a huge IOS user community.

With over 10 billion cumulative searches in 2016, to over 150 million searches per day in 2017, DuckDuckGo is surely becoming a game changer in the popular search engine games.

In addition to being a search engine that doesn’t track you and is safe from surveillance and security breaches, the DuckDuckGo Bang feature lets you search from 1000s of other sites (including yours, feel free to add your !bang here).

For example, if you search for !amazon snickers, it will take you to the direct search results page for snickers on Amazon. Thereby, saving you time and clicks.

In terms of user experience, DuckDuckGo has a very unobtrusive layout where you can even turn off ads. Yes, DuckDuckGo’s search engine is probably the only search engine that lets you turn off ads.

Another important feature that you’ll love to see in a search engine is the infinity scroll. DDG’s infinity scroll into 2nd, 3rd, and so on search pages without you having to click to change page is very refreshing, modern, and user-friendly.

With this, we can safely say that DuckDuckGo is one of the most modern, and untracked search engines that are not powered by Google.

10) Internet Archives: Best Internet Search Engine

Internet Archives Best Search Engine To Find Deleted Content

The next best search engine in our list of the top best search engines in the world is Internet Archives or Archives.org.

Internet Archives has the data of every website and online blog since 1996. You can find the information a website contained, the way it looked, and the conversation in the comments section everything via archives.org, no matter whether the website is alive, changed, or shut down for good.

Archive.org search engine is a great way to reverse engineer domains and websites, the way they looked, and what information they carried and thus easily reverse engineer them too.

Other notable alternative search engines that are popular internet search engines but couldn’t make up to our list of top 10 best search engines are:

11) Yandex Search Engine

The largest search engine in Russia, Yandex Search is owned by a corporation named Yandex. It is a robust search engine that has a lot of features like the Wizard Answer (providing additional related answers like Sports etc), auto-complete, etc.

Yandex search, like Google, is efficient enough to provide real-time answers based on your query.

12) Google Scholar

Not an alternative to Google per se, but is the best search engine for students and academic research-based searches. Google Scholar is also a great platform for bloggers to research more information and add depth to their writing.

13) Slideshare

Best search engines for searching presentations and PPT files.

14) Flickr

One of the best image search engines ever. Flickr helps you download copyright-free images, images with attribution, and videos for personal and commercial use.

Flickr also serves as one of the best image and video hosting platforms in the world.

15) Creative Commons

Created as an American non-profit organization, Creative Commons lets you search for over 300 million images from 19 collections. It’s a great image search engine for searching and downloading royalty-free images.

16) Giphy: Best Search Engine for Gifs

Giphy was founded by Alex Chung and Jace Cooke in February 2013 and gathered over during its first week itself.

Wikipedia describes Giphy as an online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound, that resemble animated GIF files.

One of the most profitable and popular features of Giphy includes the “conversational search” which enables it to surface content (gifs) based on users’ conversations via integration with messaging apps like Facebook, Twitter, Messenger, etc.

17) Quora

The best search engine to find deep answers, personal experiences, and answers to complicated queries that no other search engines including Google can.

It is not an alternative to Google but more of a forum that helps find answers to queries by real humans.

18) Vimeo

One of the best search engines for videos in the world, Vimeo is ad-free and the biggest competitor to YouTube.

Vimeo, like YouTube, also serves as a video hosting platform.

Conclusion: Top 18 Best Internet Search Engines in the World (2023)

I hope you liked our big, fat list of top best search engines that are great alternatives to Google search.

Each internet search engine listed here has a specialty in one particular department and hence you should be wise enough to leverage these in your digital and SEO marketing campaigns.

Having said that, while these alternative search engines are doing a great job, they still make up a negligible market share. Google’s search engine still owns the lion’s share in the market (or probably even more than a lion’s share) so be smart enough to leverage Google’s huge user base and bring your business/website in front of billions of people.

How to Use & Take Advantage of Search Engines in 2023?

Using The Best Search Engines SEO

If you’ve a blog or website (click here for the free step by step process to create one if you don’t have) for your business (no matter online or offline local business, you should have a portal where people can find you online) you can optimize it, write search-engine friendly articles, get backlinks and increase your website rankings in the search engine results pages.

When you rank higher (like on the first page of Google searches for your target keyword) you tap into Google’s user base and when people search for the thing you offer, you’ll appear in the search page and they’ll click on your website to visit it.

This way, you increase your website traffic and can either make money blogging or convert those visitors to buy from you (whatever you sell, no matter it be an offline store for auto repair, a pet grooming store, selling tickets for your event, you name it).

Helpful Resources to Get Started With Search Engine Marketing & SEO:

  1. How to create a blog and make money
  2. On-page SEO optimization techniques to rank on Google
  3. How to increase your website ranking on Google
  4. How to drive traffic to your website
  5. How to make money with a blog for beginners

FAQs About Best Search Engines

1) What is Dogpile?

Dogpile is a fun search engine that pulls its results from other largest and smarter search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc, and displays the results without any ads. It helps you pull out results like images, news, videos, and shopping results other than general web searches.

2) What is the Difference Between Dogpile Vs DuckDuckGo?

The main difference between Dogpile and DuckDuckGo is that Dogpile is basically a curator search engine that displays information from the top 3 search engines. However, DuckDuckGo is a full-fledged search engine in itself where it ranks and displays search results without tracking your private data or preferences.

3) Is YouTube a Search Engine?

Yes, YouTube is a search engine. In fact, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. However, YouTube is catered toward video searches and not text or image searches.

4) What is the Best PDF Search Engine?

The PDF search engine is the best PDF search engine around. Other notable PDF search engines include FindPDFDoc, So PDF, etc.
You can also use Google’s special search query for PDFs, filetype: pdf [your query], to tap into more PDFs online.

5) What is the Best Search Engine for Personal Information?

DuckDuckGo is the best search engine for personal information. It doesn’t track you or store your personal information to serve you ads. Another example is Search Encrypt which keeps your personal information safe.

6) What is The Best Search Engine for Videos?

YouTube is hands down the best search engine for videos in the world. Other video search engines include Bing, Vimeo, Yahoo, and Google’s own video search.

7) Which Search Engine Giant Was Originally Named Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide?

Yahoo! was originally named “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide”.

8) What Was the Most Popular Search Engine Before Google?

Yahoo! was the most popular search engine before Google. However, Google quickly took over to become the best search engine (to date) with personalized search and better algorithms to rank more relevant and factually correct information.

9) Is Yahoo and Google the Same?

No, Yahoo and Google are not the same. They both serve as search engines but they both are different businesses owned by separate companies.

10) What Are Yahoo and Google Examples of?

Yahoo & Google are both examples of some of the best search engines that help people with the information they are looking for on the world wide web.

11) What Was Google’s Search Engine Originally Called?

Google’s search engine was originally called BackRub, before the founders finally named it Google after the founders registered the domain Google.com on September 15th, 1997

12) Is Google Owned by Alphabet?

Yes, Google is owned by Alphabet which was created on October 2, 2015, as a restructuring of Google. Alphabet now acts as a parent or umbrella company for Google.

13) Who is the Father of Google?

Larry Page & Sergey Brin are the fathers of Google.

14) Is DuckDuckGo owned by Google?

No, DuckDuckGo isn’t owned by Google. It is an independent search engine owned by Gabriel Weinberg (founded in 2008.) DuckDuckGo is a Google competitor and focuses on privacy-focused search rather than personalized search (of Google) which often leads to privacy violations.

15) What is the safest search engine in 2023?

DuckDuckGo is the safest search engine in 2023 for privacy-focused people. It doesn’t track your online activities and doesn’t try to manipulate your results based on your personal activities.

16) What search engine is better than Google?

There’s no search engine that’s better than Google (as of now). However, DuckDuckGo is better than Google if you’re concerned about privacy. Other than that, Google is still the king with the highest search engine market share and more advanced search technology that is simply unbeatable.

17) Which is the First Search Engine in the World?

Archie search box: World's first search engine

Archie is the first search engine in the world. It was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal.

18) What is the best search engine to find a person?

Facebook is by far the best search engine to find a person. With roughly 2.96 billion active users in the last quarter of 2022, there’s hardly a person that isn’t on the platform. You can use name, location, and even phone number to find a person and chances are you’ll get the exact result on just the first try.

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Hi, I'm Swadhin Agrawal, founder, and editor-in-chief of DigitalGYD. DigitalGYD is a multiple-times award-winning blog where we aim at helping bloggers how to start a blog and grow it into a profitable online business.

I'm a professional blogger for a decade now and am the founder of Value Intent Media Pvt. Ltd., a media company that creates content for a multi-million-sized audience across various verticals.

Our research & content on DigitalGYD is often referred to by brands like The Telegraph, Forbes, Times of India, Yahoo! Finance, HuffPost, Bluehost, Neil Patel, The Next Web, etc.

6 thoughts on “Top 18 Best Search Engines in 2023: Alternatives to Google”

  1. Mark

    Although I suppose that strictly speaking they can be considered as search engines, I don’t really understand why you list sites like pinterest, quora, slideshare or flickr… I would rather put sites like ecosia, lilo, swisscow, qwant, womoki.com etc. It seems to me that these sites are more in line with what people understand by search engines.

  2. Neil Williams

    Has anyone tried SearchScene.com? It is a charitable search engine that donates 95% of its profits to charities that fight the causes and effects of climate change. It support tree planting projects and WWF, but also helps to protect the people most affected by climate change, by tackling ectreme poverty and provide clean drinking water, etc. It also has great search results and has daily changing wallpaper scenes like Bing.

    • Swadhin Agrawal

      Seems interesting Neil. How does it perform?

  3. Lancelot

    DuckDuck is that so good?
    Proofs are required, how do I know exactly if Duck isn’t making money out of my privacy and details?
    Proofs we need.
    Thank you

  4. Dashakol

    Hi,
    DuckDuckGo is not only the best in terms of privacy but also does a very much better job in advanced searches. I’ve described an example case which shows how week is Google in more advanced searches.

  5. Shantanu Sinha

    Hello Swadhin,

    Great piece of information over here :)

    Indeed Google is the top player when it comes about the search engines. Years after years Google have developed its algorithm
    thats only the best content are ranked on the top, indeed it takes a lot of work or hard work to rank our sites at the
    top most in the Google when the related query is being entered.

    Pretty common names over here but I am glad to learn some of the the new alternatives of Google which I am leanring for the
    first time. Search engines like DuckDuckgo and Baidu are something new for me to learn from here.

    Indeed people are so busy to rank their site in the Google, as they forget about the other layers like Yahoo and Bing.
    Indeed they have been spruced when Google took over the command but they are the one of the oldest player of this game
    and they to are improving there Search algorithms.

    No, doubt You tube is one of the largest video search engine, the amount of people who daily surfs youtube has the numbers
    in billions. As visual speaks more than texts and are easy to get spotted in our brains.

    Pinterest is also increasing day by day, people love to posts some relative information on this social media platform
    with a beautiful picture, which attracts the people to search their problems over here.

    Thanks for sharing these amazing list over here.

    Shantanu.

Comments are closed.