Search engine comparison
General-purpose search engines as well as front-ends for the few actual search engines are listed below with subjective ratings of text and image search results, privacy policies and small useful notes. Search engines with no publicly facing interface (specialized pay-walled search engines) are not included.
Freely Usable Actual Search Engines[edit]
Actual search engines have and use crawler software to build and maintain their own web index. Closed-off search engines (not publicly usable) are not included. Bing front-ends, Google front-ends and other front-ends for actual search engines are listed in their own sections below.
English (and other languages)[edit]
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Text Search | Image Search | Privacy Policy | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bing | www.bing.com | Microsoft | 1998/2009 | 
|
|
Big Brother on steroids | |
| Exalead | www.exalead.com/search/ | Dassault Systèmes SE | 2000 | 
|
Nope | Horrible | |
| Gigablast | gigablast.com | Matt Wells | 2000 | 
|
Nope | Unclear | |
| Google Search | www.google.com | Alphabet Inc | 1998 |
|
|
Big Brother on steroids | Broken as of January 2020, shows a "consent" message instead of a search field |
| MetaGer | metager.org | SUMA EV |
|
Nope | privacy-respecting | Hosted in Germany by a German foundation. | |
| Mojeek | www.mojeek.com | Mojeek | 2004 |
|
Nope | Privacy-respecting | |
| SymbolHound | symbolhound.com | David Crane | circa 2010's | 
|
Nope | Unclear | Alright for programming related queries, useless for everything else |
| YaCy | There is a variety of publicly available nodes. search.linuxreviews.org |
Free software (Peer-to-Peer) |
2005 |
|
|
Depends on the node | You can install YaCy and run your own node. |
| Yandex | yandex.com | Yandex | 1997 | 
|
|
Big Brother | Owned and operated by the Russians. |
Czech[edit]
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Text Search | Image Search | Privacy Policy | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seznam | www.seznam.cz obrazky.seznam.cz (images) |
Seznam.cz, a.s. | 1996 | ? |
|
Collects a lot of data |
Chinese[edit]
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Text Search | Image Search | Privacy Policy | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sogou | www.sogou.com | Tencent | 2010 | ? | ? | ? | |
| Baidu | www.baidu.com | Baidu | 2000 | ? | ? | ? |
German[edit]
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Text Search | Image Search | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MetaGer | metager.de | SUMA EV |
|
No | Also available in English. Has it's own index (using Solr back-end). |
Korean[edit]
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Text Search | Image Search | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Naver | www.naver.com | Naver Corp. | 1999 |
|
|
Bing front-ends[edit]
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Privacy Policy | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ecosia | www.ecosia.org | Ecosia | 2009 | Sends a ID to Bing along with search requests unless the browser asks Do-Not-Track. | Donated 47% of its income to organizations planting trees |
| DuckDuckGo | duckduckgo.com | Duck Duck Go, Inc | 1998 | Privacy-respecting | Most links are sourced from Bing, results are complimented with their own DuckDuckBot crawler. |
| Givero | Givero, Denmark | givero.com | Donates a portion of their profits to a variety of causes like the rainforest, ocean cleanup and animal protection. | ||
| Qwant | www.qwant.com | Qwant (France) | 2013 | Privacy-respecting | Has its own sorting algorithm. The search results are Bing results ordered slightly better |
| yahoo! | consent.yahoo.com | Verizon Media | 1995 | Big Brother on steroids | Search page is broken as of January 2020, redirects to a "consent" page. |
Google front-ends[edit]
Web portals who serve Google search results are forbidden from using results from other sources[1].
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Privacy Policy | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| StartPage | www.startpage.com | Startpage B.V, Netherlands | 1998 | Privacy-respecting | StartPage is only allowed to use search results for Google when it is accessed using desktop browsers. The mobile version has search results from Bing. |
Yandex front-ends[edit]
| Search engine | URL | Company | Launched | Privacy Policy | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Swisscows | swisscows.com | Swisscows, Switzerland | Privacy-respecting | Swisscows does not state that it's merely a front-end for Yandex anywhere on its site. A few quick searches on make it obvious; the results and their order are nearly identical. |
Metasearch engines[edit]
There are a lot of metasearch engines based on the free software Searx software. There is a very long list at asciimoo.github.io. You will have to patiently try a lot of them before you find one which actually works, the majority of instances on that list are either blacklisted by all the search engines they use as sources or plain broken.
MetaGer shows results from Bing and Yandex in addition to results from it's own index.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ "Google prohibits any company that displays Google search results from ever, even on another website that doesn't show Google's results, displaying search results from another search engine. Basically, Google demands exclusivity. These practices need to stop, they are hurting the search ecosystem. The Demise of the Meta Web Search Engine
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