Try These 15 Search Engines Instead of Google For Better Search Results
As the web has gotten bigger, the internet search engines
too have evolved themselves to cater to various needs of the users. With 63.9
percent market share (as reported by comScore in October 2015), Google still
reigns supreme in the market of search engines.
That said, Google isn’t the only search engine out there.
Many other players live up to the tasks that Google might not do for you (as
you desire). They provide various interfaces, unique features and search
algorithms based on unique philosophies.
Knowing the right search engine to make your query means
you don’t spend your valuable time browsing through stuffs you don’t need. One
could easily get lost in the vast world of internet without proper tools. Here
below we present you 15 search engines to try as alternatives to Google for
better search results.
1. DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is the first choice for search engines among
the users who want to remain anonymous on the internet. While privacy is a highly
concerned issued on the internet, DuckDuckGo doesn’t collect your browsing
history, social media profiles, emails to give you personalized search results,
unlike Google.
Many find DuckDuckGo user-friendly for its features like
‘zero-click’ information (all your answers are found on the first result page),
infinite scroll and prompts to clarify your questions. Also the ad spam is much
less than Google. If search privacy is your concern, try DuckDuckGo.
2. Blekko
Blekko’s unique interface serves results by category. It
uses a thing called “slashtags”- which is a text tag preceded by a ‘/’ slash
character, just like “hashtags” in Twitter, to search in its database with the
related keywords in categories.
Developed by ex-Googlers, it presents itself as the ‘spam
free search engine’. It does log user specific information but deletes it
within 48 hours.
3. WolframAlpha
WolframAplha identifies itself as a computational
knowledge engine which gives facts and data for number of topics from
externally sourced ‘curated data’, instead of caching web pages.
It can do all sorts of calculations, from as simple as
addition to complex calculus and statistics. It tends to the needs of the
knowledge hungry kid for any kind of knowledge s/he seeks.
4. DogPile
In the 90s, DogPile was enjoying its glory days as the
choice for fast and efficient web searching before Google. Now with a growing
index and slick presentation, it is once again trying to make its come back in
the arena.
It curates information, links, images and videos from
other search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex to give helpful crosslink
results and offers features like categories, preferences, search filters,
recent searches, etc. for better search results.
5. Yippy
Formerly known as Clusty, Yippy is a metasearch engine
that brings out the power of many conventional search engines to give a
collective result. If you want to explore the deep web, Yippy is your tool.
Deep web pages are harder to locate since they are hosted
in private networks and are isolated. Since Yippy provides results in form of
‘clouds’, it is highly likely to locate buried webpages for you which the
traditional search methods cannot find.
6. Bing
Bing is arguably the second most popular search engine
today with almost 20% market share. It is powered by Microsoft which put
everything on its disposal to make it a fair challenger to Google.
It is unlikely that Bing is going to dethrone Google in
the near future but Bing has still got almost all the bling that google offers.
It is definitely worth a try.
7. Ask
Formerly Ask Jeeves, now Ask.com has approximately
3% of the search market share. Based on question/answer format, it is popular
for accommodating the natural, colloquial language.
Most of the questions are answered by other users which
are presented in a super-clean list. Besides that, it also has the general
search functionality.
8. Mahalo
Dedicated to provide high relevance and higher quality
content, Mahalo’s contents are human-powered. It has a committee of editors who
manually sift and vet thousands of content.
It obviously means that you’ll get fewer results than
with conventional search engines that employ spider robot programs to crawl and
index the websites in the web. Mahalo offers regular web searching in addition
to asking questions like Ask.com.
9. Adswish
Adswish follows the Google search engine model for
classified ads. To bring the most relevant products and services to the users,
it provides data-specific search results as per the keyword given by the user
for specific product or service in the desired category.
Adwish is that one search engine that promises to deliver
just the right product or service online.
10. ChaCha
ChaCha is a lot more like Ask where users can ask any
particular question that gets answered by independent contractors called
Guides. It provides free and real-time answer to any questions and has a number
of quizzes to help the user decide on a number of topics. Alexa ranks it as the
eighth most popular search engine.
11. Yahoo
Yahoo used to power its own web search until recently.
Now that it has partnered up with Microsoft, it uses Bing search results for
its web engine. Yahoo Answers is there for the things that engines
like Ask.com and Chacha.com do.
Yahoo Finance is by far the best financial news
aggregator currently available. Other handy features include travel guide,
horoscope, weather report, retail options and handful more, although it is now
entirely powered by Bing.
12. Yandex
Yandex is the most popular web search engine in Russia
and the fourth largest in the world. Founded in 1997, this Russian based
company serves over 150 million search queries per day.
From mail to maps, Yandex provides almost every service
that Google does and accommodates multiple languages to facilitate cross
lingual searches. Without doubt Yandex, with its vast resources, is one of the
best alternatives to Google.
13. Baidu
Known as “China’s Google”, Baidu is the largest search
engine in China that facilitates web searching in Chinese language as well as
in Japanese. Almost a billion web pages are indexed by Baidu along with more
than 80 million images and 10 million multimedia files. That clearly makes it a
major player in the search engines industry.
14. Ixquick
Ixquick, like DuckDuckGo, takes privacy issues very
seriously. No cookies, no prying into search history, it collects none of the
user specific details. Just the thing that Tor browser needs which is why
Ixquick is the default search engine for Tor.
For better search results, it makes use of preferences
chosen by the user that get deleted after 90 days of inactivity. It is
supported in 17 different languages and serves 5.7 million queries per day.
15. The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive lets you trace back time and see
what a webpage in the past looked like. For years, it has been taking snapshots
of the entire World Wide Web and has maintained an online archive containing
millions of images, books, software, movies and much more. Technically, it is
not a search engine but it lets users search for iterations of a website in the
past.
www.lifehack.org
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