The World’s Most Popular Search Engines

It is reasonable to say that one certain California based search engine has dominated the world’s needs for internet browsing over the last decade.

But though you may not know it, there are plenty of other search engines in existence that do much the same job, even better, some might say.

Here are the world’s most popular search engines.

Google

Unique monthly users: 900,000,000

One of the three behemoths of the internet-digital age, Google is a giant. Dominating internet users’ search needs hasn’t been enough for the company with the motto ‘Do No Evil’.

With its own browser, tablet computers and smartphones you can literally conduct all internet-based activity through Google-only products, if you wanted to. Though its ads, spam and sharing of personal information has come in for criticism, its news, images and maps features are unrivalled.

bing

Unique monthly users: 165,000,000

Originally named MSN Search, bing is Microsoft’s attempt to grab back a share of the market and is just one of the fronts the original computer giant is battling Google on.

A support function appears on the left-hand side of the screen when searching, offering suggestions of what you might be trying to find. The top of the screen shows search options and useful tools such as ‘wiki suggestions’, ‘visual search’ and ‘related searches’.

Yahoo! Search

Unique monthly users: 160,000,000

For years Yahoo! has been one of the internet’s mega web portals – email, news, shopping, directory, games and more are all accessible through the main site. It’s no surprise then that it’s search engine rakes in 160 million users a month.

However, Yahoo! Search has never really been an authentic search tool. From 2001 the site’s storage and data retrieval was powered by Inktomi and then Google until 2004 when it finally went independent. That didn’t last long though with the site being powered by bing since 2009.

Ask

Unique monthly users: 125,000,000

Known for years as Ask Jeeves, this old page bills itself more as a question answering site rather than a search engine. Not the cleanest of home pages but that’s partly to accommodate the multiple options on offer. Answers to your question, even if you didn’t specifically ask one, appear on the right-hand side adjacent to search results.

Its results groupings give Ask a unique offering and its ‘explore answers about’ option makes it more than just a direct, abrupt search tool.

Aol Search

Unique monthly users: 33,000,000

An extremely clean homepage, to such an extent that you may actually find yourself waiting for more content to load, its results page though looks all too familiar – as the graphic next to the searchbox says, it is ‘enhanced by Google’.

As such, Aol Search logs your searches and saves any information. The flaw of this was exposed in 2006 when the company accidently released a file containing twenty million search keywords for over 650,000 users.

Unique monthly users figures as derived from Alexa Global Traffic Rank and U.S. Traffic Rank from digital analysis companies Compete and Quantcast.