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.

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 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 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 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.

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 absolutely minimum.

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 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 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 filter results by images or video. Yandex also offers additional services comparable to Google, like Mail and Maps.