Table of Contents
- The Top 10 Most Popular Search Engines In The World
- Search Engine Market Share
- Other Search Engines Worth Considering
- Resources to Learn More about Search Engines
Which are the 10 best and most popular search engines in the World? It may be a shocking surprise for many, but Google is not the only search engine available on the Internet today!
Besides Google and Bing, other search engines may not be so well known, but they still serve millions of search queries daily.
In fact, several alternative search engines want to take Google’s throne, but none is ready (yet) to even pose a threat. Google is the most popular search engine, with an amazing 91.58% market share compared to 3.01% of second place Bing.
Nevertheless, other search engines are worth considering, and the best Google alternatives are presented below.
The Top 10 Most Popular Search Engines In The World
List of the 10 best search engines in 2024, ranked by popularity.
- Microsoft Bing
- Yahoo
- Baidu
- Yandex
- DuckDuckGo
- Ask.com
- Ecosia
- Aol.com
- Internet Archive
1. Google
No need for further introductions. Google holds first place in search with a stunning difference of 88.57% from second place Bing. Google first launched 25 years ago (1998) and quickly became the top search engine because of its ability to deliver accurate answers to users’ queries in the fastest way possible.
According to statistics from Statista and Statcounter, Google dominates the market in all countries on any device (desktop, mobile, and tablet). In particular, Google’s desktop market share is 81.74%, and mobile market share is 95.49%.
Why is Google the most popular search engine?
The quality of its search results made Google the most popular and trusted search engine. Google is using sophisticated algorithms to present the most accurate results to 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 AI and machine learning) and still remains the most reliable way to find exactly what you are looking for on the Internet.
Google is handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, and its index holds hundreds of terabytes of information.
2. Microsoft Bing
The best alternative search engine to Google is Microsoft Bing. Bing’s search engine share over the years is between 2.83% and 12.31%.
Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in search, but despite their efforts, they still have not convinced 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.
In 2023, Bing was faster than Google to release an AI Chatbot service (Bing Chat) based on the popular GPT4, but despite the initial acceptance by users, their market share remained at low levels.
Bing originated from Microsoft’s previous search engines (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, Live Search), and according to Wikipedia, it is the #26 most visited website on the Internet.
3. Yahoo
Yahoo is one of the most popular email providers, and its web search engine holds third place in search with an average of 1.24% market share.
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 by Google.
As of October 2019, Yahoo! Search is once again provided exclusively by Microsoft 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 9th most visited website on the Internet (According to Wikipedia).
4. Baidu
Baidu has a global market share between 0.68% and 11.26%.
Baidu was founded in 2000 and is China’s most popular search engine. 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 6 in the Wikipedia Website Rankings.
Although Baidu is accessible worldwide, it is only available in Chinese.
Besides search services, Baidu offers other products for the Chinese audience, like Baidu Maps and Baidu Baike (similar to Wikipedia). For many, Baidu is referred to as the “Google” of China.
5. Yandex
Yandex, Russia’s most popular search engine, has a global market share between 0.5% and 1.16%.
According to Wikipedia, Yandex.ru is among the 10 most popular websites on the Internet, with a ranking position of 8 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 0.58%.
According to DuckDuckGo traffic stats, they are serving more than 3 billion searches per month (compared to Google’s 3.5 billion 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 its own (like Google and Bing), but it generates its search results using various sources.
In other words, they don’t have their own data, but they depend on other sources (like Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, and StackOverflow) to provide answers to users’ questions.
This is a big limitation compared to Google, which 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, does not track users, and is not fully loaded with ads.
You can use DuckDuckGo through any browser, as a browser extension, or download their dedicated browser app from App Store and Google Play.
7. Ask.com
Formerly known as Ask Jeeves, Ask.com receives approximately 0.42% of the search engine market share. ASK is based on a question/answer format where other users answer most questions or are in the form of polls.
It also has the general search functionality, but the results returned lack quality compared to Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
According to SimilarWeb, Ask.com receives around 36 million visits per month.
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 Bing powers its search results. 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 approximately 45 searches to finance planting one tree.
In terms of search engine market share, Ecosia’s share is around 0.10%.
According to Ecosia, 20 million people use their search engine, and their initiative led to planting more than 180 million trees. Their monthly income according to their financial reports is $4 million.
9. AOL.com
The famous old-time AOL is still in the top 10 search engines, with a market share of nearly 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.
On May 3, 2021, AOL was sold to Apollo Global Management for $5 billion (the same company owning Yahoo) and became part of the new Yahoo! Inc.
Regarding traffic, AOL receives 339 million visits per month, making it one of the top 30 visited websites in the United States.
10. Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-profit search engine you can use to find websites, free books, movies, software, and more.
Its index consists of 845B websites, 39M books, 11M movies, and many other online resources.
One of the most popular features of Internet Archive is the WayBackMachine. 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.
Here is a breakdown of desktop and mobile global search engine market share (January 2024). Google dominates the market with more than 80% on desktop and 95% on mobile.
| Search Engine | Desktop | Mobile |
|---|---|---|
| 81.74% | 95.49% | |
| Bing | 10.52% | 0.53% |
| Yahoo | 2.8% | 0.48% |
| Yandex | 2.35% | 1.39% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.84% | 0.44% |
| Baidu | 0.84% | 1.03% |
Other Search Engines Worth Considering
StartPage
StartPage was founded in 2006 in the Netherlands. They advertise their company as the world’s most private search engine. Startpage protects users’ privacy by not allowing tracking systems to record a user’s searches.
When performing a search query in Startpage, you can select a specific region for the results, set the family filter, and configure several other settings without logging in.
Wiki
Wiki.com is a dedicated search engine for wikis. You can select between all wikis, Wikipedia only, encyclopedias, or wikis submitted by other people.
Google powers the wiki results, and they are limited to wikis. If you want to find something specific in Wikipedia or other popular wikis, you can do it faster through wiki.
YouTube
YouTube is the most popular video platform and the second most popular search engine globally. YouTube has more than 2.3 billion active users worldwide.
Many of these users turn to YouTube first when looking for answers or information on the web and not to any other search engine. It is estimated that YouTube processes more than 3 billion searches a month.
Wolframalpha
WolframAlpha is different than all the other search engines. They market it as a Computational Knowledge Engine that can give you facts and data for several topics.
It can do all sorts of calculations; for example, if you enter “mortgage 2000” as input, it will calculate your loan amount, interest paid, etc., based on several assumptions.
Openverse
Openverse is a web search engine that allows users to find content they can reuse. All content in their Search index is under Creative Commons licenses.
Currently, only images and audio are included in their index, but they have plans to add open texts and video.
These are the most popular web search engines on the Internet today.
The list is by no means complete, and many more will be created in the future, but as far as the first places are concerned, Google and Bing will hold the lead positions for years to come.
Resources to Learn More about Search Engines
How Search Engines Work – A tutorial on how search engines work (includes animated video). Covers crawling, indexing, and ranking.
What is SEO?– Learn what search engine optimization is and how to optimize your website for search engines.
How to become an SEO Expert – Master the secrets of search engines by becoming an SEO expert.
Digital Marketing Courses – The best courses to learn about the role of search engines in digital marketing.
