A List of Search Engines to Use Instead of Google

Try these other search engines to find what you're looking for online

Search Engine
Image © All Canada Photos RM / Getty Images
by Elise Moreau
Elise Moreau is a digital marketer, web content writer and copywriter. She has covered web trends for Lifewire and previously About.com, since 2011.
Updated January 30, 2019

Everyone knows that Google is king when it comes to web search, but if you're not all that impressed with the Google results you've been getting or you're looking for a change of scenery, a good search engines list of alternatives can comes in real handy.

Google might be the search engine of choice for most people, but it doesn't have to be yours if you find something else that you like using. Here are a few other search engines worth check out.

Bing: More Visuals and Better Search Results

Bing
Photo © Kajdi Szabolcs / Getty Images

What We Like

  • The customizable homepage is eye-candy with beautiful photography.

  • Bing crawls hidden and non-hidden content equally.

  • Search results include more videos than competitors include.

What We Don't Like

  • Old, reliable pages are favored over fresh, new content.

  • Homepages are ranked before blogs.

  • Bing webmaster tools need lots of work.

Bing is Microsoft's search engine. You may remember it being formerly called Windows Live Search and MSN Search back in the day.

Bing is a much more visual search engine, providing users with different tools and offering them the chance to earn Bing Rewards that can be used to receive gift cards and enter into sweepstakes. As the second most popular search engine behind Google, some users say that the search results they get are better.

Yahoo: Quick Access to the Latest News and Other Topics

Yahoo!
Photo © Ethan Miller / Getty Images

What We Like

  • More than a search engine, it's a web portal with news, weather, trends, and horoscope.

  • Bing's search engine powers Yahoo search.

  • Lots to see and do in addition to the search capability.

What We Don't Like

  • Advertisements are not clearly labeled as ads.

  • Busy site is not for minimalists.

Yahoo is another popular search engine that has been around even longer than Google has. It's not far behind Bing as the third most popular search engine.

What makes Yahoo stand out from Google and Bing is that it's known as a web portal rather than just a standalone search engine. Yahoo provides its users a wide range of services focused on everything from shopping and travel to sports and entertainment.

Ask: Designed to Provide You With Answers to Your Questions

Ask.com
Screenshot of Ask.com

What We Like

  • Supports user queries in natural language as well as traditional searches.

  • No distracting graphics or ads on the homepage.

What We Don't Like

  • Slow to add new possible search results.

  • Has a smaller database than its larger competitors.

You might remember a time when Ask was called Ask Jeeves. Although it's not nearly as powerful as Google or Bing, lots of people have long loved Ask for its simple question and answer format.

You can also use Ask like a regular search engine by typing in any term at all that's not asked as a question. You'll get a list of results in a similar layout to Google with popular related questions and answers on the side.

DuckDuckGo: For When You Don't Want Your Activity to Be Tracked

DuckDuckGo
Screenshot of DuckDuckGo.com

What We Like

  • Highly protective of user privacy.

  • Ads don't track you (unless you click on them).

What We Don't Like

  • Search results aren't dated.

  • Overall search capability isn't as good as that of competitors.

If you're extremely picky about privacy and want to avoid as much search engine tracking as possible, DuckDuckGo is a must-try. It's a unique alternative for the simple fact that it prides itself on maintaining "real privacy" without any web tracking of its users whatsoever.

As a bonus, DuckDuckGo provides you with one of the cleanest, most beautiful search experiences. It also focuses on providing top quality search results by helping users clarify what they're looking for and keeping spam to an absolute minimum.

StartPage: The World's Most Private Search Engine

IxQuick
Screenshot of IxQuick.com

What We Like

  • Offers completely private searches.

  • Include Anonymous View feature so users can visit search results privately.

  • Uses Google search results but pays the company to strip identifying information.

What We Don't Like

  • Suggestions are not offered as you type by default (but can be enabled).

  • Only two filters are available on the homepage: web and images.

Like DuckDuckGo, StartPage is all about protecting users' privacy, claiming to be the only search engine in the world that doesn't track your IP address or searches. It also claims to deliver search results that are more comprehensive and more accurate than other search engines because of its advanced metasearch technology.

StartPage offers a pleasant search experience with search filters for the web, images, videos and advanced options. You can also get StartPage as a Chrome extension for greater convenience.

Wolfram Alpha: Get Expert-Level Answers to Complicated Queries

Wolfram Alpha
Screenshot of WolframAlpha.com

What We Like

  • Curated data is updated constantly

  • Simple interface.

  • Links to lots of examples on the homepage.

What We Don't Like

  • Concept is different from most search engines.

  • Free account contains ads.

  • Some features require a paid subscription.

Wolfram Alpha takes a slightly different approach to search by focusing on computational knowledge. It's one of the best search engines for very analytical, knowledge-based queries.

Rather than giving you links to website pages and documents, it gives you results based on facts and data it finds from external sources. The results page will show you dates, statistics, images, graphs and all sorts of other relevant things according to what you searched for.

Yandex: Great for When You Need to Translate Content

Yandex
Screenshot of Yandex.com

What We Like

  • Clean, colorful user interface.

  • Blocks dangerous websites and pop-ups.

  • Excellent translation feature.

What We Don't Like

  • No longer in development for Android.

Yandex is the most popular search engine used in Russia. It has a clean look, it's easy to use, and its translation features are a big help for people needing to translate information between different languages.

The search results page has a similar (but cleaner) layout to what Google has, and users can also filter results by images or video. Yandex also offers additional services comparable to Google, like Mail and Maps.

Similar Site Search: Find Comparable Websites

Similar Site Search
Screenshot of SimilarSiteSearch.com

What We Like

  • Search by URL or by keywords.

  • Free-to-use database accessible on any platform.

  • Supports many languages.

What We Don't Like

  • Results don't include smaller, lesser-known sites.

  • Doesn't work like traditional search engines.

While this one won't entirely replace Google or any other standard search engine, it's still worth mentioning here. Similar Site Search allows you to plug in any popular website URL to get a results page of comparable sites.

So if you want to see which other video sites there are out there, you might type "youtube.com" in the search field to see what similar sites come up. The only downside is that this search engine has only indexed very big and popular sites, so you're unlikely to get results for smaller, lesser known sites.