The Best Search Engines of 2020

Google is the reigning king of spartan searching and is the most-used search engine in the world. While it doesn't offer all the shopping center features of Yahoo or the human curation of Mahalo, Google is fast, relevant and the largest single catalog of web pages available. The search giant also tracks an incredible amount of information that many people don't know they are giving out.

Try Google images, maps, and news features; they are outstanding services for locating photos, geographic directions, and news headlines.

At first, DuckDuckGo.com looks like Google. However, there are many subtleties that make this spartan search engine different.

DuckDuckGo offers some slick features, like zero-click information wherein all your answers are found on the first results page. DuckDuckgo offers disambiguation prompts that help to clarify what question you are really asking. Plus, ad spam is much less than Google. Most significantly, DuckDuckGo does not track information about you or share your search habits with others.

Give DuckDuckGo.com a try. You might really like this clean and simple search engine.

Bing is Microsoft's attempt at unseating Google, and arguably the second-most-popular search engine today. Bing used to be MSN Search until it was updated in the summer of 2009.

Touted as a decision engine, Bing tries to support your researching by offering suggestions in the leftmost column, while also giving you various search options across the top of the screen. Things like wiki suggestions, visual search, and related searches might be very useful to you. Bing is not dethroning Google in the near future, but it is definitely worth trying. 

Years ago, Dogpile preceded Google as a fast and efficient choice for web searching. Things changed in the late 1990s, Dogpile faded into obscurity, and Google became king.

Today, however, Dogpile is coming back, with a growing index and a clean and quick presentation that is a testimony to its halcyon days. If you want to try a search tool with pleasant presentation and helpful crosslink results, definitely try Dogpile!

Yippy is a Deep Web engine that searches other search engines for you. Unlike the regular Web, which is indexed by robot spider programs, Deep Web pages are usually harder to locate by conventional search.

That's where Yippy becomes very useful. If you are searching for obscure hobby interest blogs, hard-to-locate government information, offbeat news, academic research, and similar content, then Yippy is your tool. 

Google Scholar is a special version of Google. This search engine will help you win debates.

Google Scholar focuses on scientific and hard-research academic material that has been subjected to scrutiny by scientists and scholars. Example content includes graduate theses, legal and court opinions, academic publications, medical research reports, physics research papers, and economics and world politics explanations.

If you are looking for serious information that can stand up in a heated debate with educated people, then Google Scholar is where you want to go to arm yourself with high-powered sources.

Webopedia is one of the most useful websites on the web. Webopedia is an encyclopedic resource dedicated to searching technology terminology and computer definitions.

Teach yourself what domain name system is, or what DDRAM means on your computer. Webopedia is a perfect resource for non-technical people to make more sense of the computers around them. 

Yahoo is several things: it is a search engine, a news aggregator, a shopping center, an email service, a travel directory, a horoscope and games center, and more.

This web-portal breadth of choice makes this a very helpful site for internet beginners. Searching the web should also be about discovery and exploration, and Yahoo delivers. (By the way, here's what happened to Yahoo avatars and Yahoo 360 in case you were wondering.)