1. Google

What made Google the most popular and trusted search engine is the quality of its search results. Google is using sophisticated algorithms to present the most accurate results to the users.

Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the idea that websites referenced by other websites are more important than others and thus deserve a higher ranking in the search results.

Over the years the Google ranking algorithm has been enriched with hundreds of other factors (including the help of machine learning) and still remains the most reliable way to find exactly what you are looking for on the Internet.

2.Microsoft Bing

Update: Bing was renamed Microsoft Bing in October 2020.

The best alternative search engine to Google is Microsoft Bing. Bing’s search engine share is between 2.83% and 12.31%.

Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in search, but despite their efforts, they still did not manage to convince users that their search engine can be as reliable as Google.

Their search engine market share is constantly low even though Bing is the default search engine on Windows PCs.

Bing originated from Microsoft’s previous search engines (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Live Search), and according to Alexa rank is the #30 most visited website on the Internet.

3. Yahoo

From October 2011 to October 2015, Yahoo search was powered exclusively by Bing. In October 2015 Yahoo agreed with Google to provide search-related services and until October 2018, the results of Yahoo were powered both by Google and Bing.

As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again provided exclusively by Bing.

Yahoo is also the default search engine for Firefox browsers in the United States (since 2014).

Yahoo’s web portal is very popular and ranks as the 11 most visited website on the Internet (According to Alexa).

4. Baidu

Baidu was founded in 2000 and it is the most popular search engine in China. Its market share is increasing steadily and according to Wikipedia, Baidu is serving billions of search queries per month. It is currently ranked at position 4, in the Alexa Rankings.

Although Baidu is accessible worldwide, it is only available in the Chinese language

5. Yandex.ru

Yandex, Russian’s most popular search engine has a global market share between 0.5% and 1.16%.

According to Alexa, Yandex.ru is among the 30 most popular websites on the Internet with a ranking position of 4 in Russian.

Yandex presents itself as a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning.

According to Wikipedia, Yandex operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 65% market share in that country

6.DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo’s search engine market share is around 0.66%.

According to DuckDuckGo traffic stats, they are serving on average 90+ million searches per day but still their overall market share is constantly below 0.6%.

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

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

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

On the positive side, DuckDuck Go has a clean interface, it does not track users and it is not fully loaded with ads.

7. Ask.com

Formerly known as Ask Jeeves, Ask.com receives approximately 0.42% of the search share. ASK is based on a question/answer format where most questions are answered by other users or are in the form of polls.

It also has the general search functionality but the results returned lack quality compared to Google or even Bing and Yahoo.

8. Ecosia

Ecosia is a Berlin-based social business founded by Christian Kroll in 2009. The main reason ecosia was created was to help in financing planting trees and restoration projects. It is thus known as the “tree planting search engine”.

How does ecosia work? Ecosia is a Bing partner, meaning that its search results are powered by Bing. Ecosia makes money to support the planning of trees by displaying ads in their search results. Every time an ad is clicked, ecosia gets a small share. It is estimated that it takes approx 45 searches to finance the planting of one tree.

In terms of search engine market share, Ecosia’s share is around 0.10%

9. AOL.com

The old-time famous AOL is still in the top 10 search engines with a market share that is close to 0.05%.

The AOL network includes many popular websites like engadget.com, techchrunch.com, and huffingtonpost.com. On June 23, 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications.

11.Internet Archive

archive.org is the internet archive search engine. You can use it to find out how a web site looked since 1996. It is a very useful tool if you want to trace the history of a domain and examine how it has changed over the years