A List of Search Engines to Use Instead of Google

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

Yahoo is another popular search engine that has actually 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.

You may remember a time when Ask was called Ask Jeeves. Although it's not quite as popular as the two big ones mentioned above, lots of people love it for its simple question and answer format. You can also use it like a regular search engine by simply 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 is a unique alternative for the simple fact that it prides itself on maintaining "real privacy" without any web tracking of its users whatsoever. It also focuses on providing top quality search results by helping users clarify what they're looking for and keeping spam to an absolutely minimum. If you're extremely picky about design and want the cleanest, most beautiful search experience, DuckDuckGo is a must-try.

Like DuckDuckGo, IxQuick is all about protecting users' privacy—calling itself "the world's most private search engine." It also claims to deliver search results that are more comprehensive and more accurate than other search engines because of its advanced metasearch technology. IxQuick uses a unique five-star rating system to help you see which results are best related to your query.

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

Yandex is actually 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 search through images, video, news and more.

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.