17+ Top Search Engines in the World (Web, Image & Video)

Are you looking for a comprehensive search engine to help you find what you need on the web, be it written content, images, and videos?

I’ve prepared a guide of over 17+ different top search engines to help you choose the search engine that best serves your interests.

Google remains the best search engine with over 91% market share.

Other best search engines include Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Yahoo, etc. This list explains why Google tops and offers an alternative search engine.

Read through the guide to find the most powerful search engines and why!

How do Search Engines work?

Search engines work through steps; crawling, indexing, and ranking. I’ll expound on each step below:

Crawling: The search engines send bots (or web crawlers) to scour the internet and collect data. These bots follow website links and add any new pages to the search engine’s index.

Indexing: The search engines organize the information from web crawlers to make it easy to find what you’re looking for. They create a giant database of all the pages they can find on the internet.

Ranking: Once the bots index the website, it’s time for the ranking algorithms to come into play. Algorithms determine which website content appears on search results.

Top 7 Most Popular Search Engines In The World (Alternative Search Engines)

• Google
• Microsoft Bing
• Yandex
• Yahoo
• Baidu
• DuckDuckGo
• Ask.com

1. Google

Google is the most popular search engine, with a search engine market share of 91.86%, as of 2021. Google LLC owns the search engine and established it in 1997.

The company headquarters are in Mountain View, California. It dominates the market in all devices, including mobile phones, tablets, and desktops.

Pros

• It has the highest market share and enormous traffic.
• Excellent result filtering options, including relevance, language, location, etc.
• The search engine features dozens of inbuilt tools
• Information and news updates real quick

Cons

• Ranking organically on the platform is competitive.
• Paid traffic on the Google search engine is expensive.

2. Microsoft Bing

Microsoft Corporation’s Bing commands a considerable market share of 3.2% as of 2021. Microsoft launched Bing on 3rd June 2009 at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, U.S.A.

Bing has a much higher usage in the UK and the USA topping at approximately 20%. It is the default search engine for Windows computers.

Pros

• Its image search is excellent.
• The results are more relevant and accurate.
• It has less competition on organic keywords.
• Offers search results for Yahoo, Bing, and MSN.

Cons

• Its loading time is longer compared to Google.
• The mapping system is quite worse.

3. Yandex

Yandex is a Russian multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. It is one of the largest technology companies in Russia and operates the Yandex search engine.

Arkady Volozh, Ilya Segalovich, and Elena Kolmanov founded Yandex in 1997, and its headquarters are in Moscow.

The Yandex search engine market share is about 1.52% worldwide as of 2022, with the significant searches being in Russia at 52.4%.

Pros

• The search engine is best for Russian language search.
• It’s better for Russian businesses because of the market share.

Cons

• Less famous than Google outside of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

4. Yahoo

Yahoo search engine has a market share of 1.32% worldwide as of 2022. Jerry Yang and David Filo founded the Yahoo search engine in January 1994.

The headquarters are in the heart of Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, California. Today, most of its popularity is among users over 60 years.

Pros

• It has better shopping search results than other search engines.
• It has a Yahoo answer site with dozens of answers on various categories and topics.
• It has many advanced communication tools like messenger, email services, and more.

Cons

• The search engine offers non-dated results making it hard to differentiate between organic results and ads.

5. Baidu

Baidu is a Chinese search engine with a market share of 0.77% as of September 2021. Robin Li, the founder, launched Baidu on January 18th, 2000.

The company’s headquarters are in Beijing, China. It is the largest Chinese-language search engine and also provides an English-language option.

Pros

• It offers a better selection of results for Chinese-specific searches than other international search engines.
• The search engine is easy to monetize on target keywords.
• It has a broad market share amongst mobile phone users.
• Its filters are robust, making it easy to find relevant results.

Cons

• The Chinese government censors the search engine, meaning some results may be unavailable.

6. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is an Internet privacy company that offers a search engine alternative to Google Search. The company headquarters are in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Gabriel Weinberg founded DuckDuckGo on February 29, 2008. Today DuckDuckGo has a market share of 0.64% as of 2021 and about 2.45% in the US market.

Pros

• It doesn’t collect or share personal information.
• The ads are not personalized or targeted.
• There’s no search leakage to third parties.

Cons

• It has only a few integrated services.
• Lack of personalization results in irrelevance in results.

7. Ask.com

Ask is a question-and-answer-focused search engine launched in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen. InterActiveCorp later acquired the search engine in July 2005.

Ask.com headquarters are in New York, United States, and has approximately 44.2 Million Monthly Active Users. The platform allows you to enter search queries or questions on the search bar, and the engine crawls for relevant answers from experts.

Pros

• The search engine has a user-friendly interface.
• It has a wide range of topics covered.
• Results are usually of good quality and from experts.

Cons

• The search engine is not as popular as others on this list, resulting in lower traffic.

Other Search Engines (Alternatives)

8. Ecosia

Ecosia is like no other search engine. The search engine plants trees with ad revenue and profits. Christian Kroll and Tim Schumacher launched in December 2009, and its headquarters are in Berlin, Germany.

The company has planted over 100 million trees since its launch from over 15 million users. As of 2021, the Ecosia web search engine has a market share of 0.10%.

Pros

• The company plants trees with its ad revenue.
• It offers fast and relevant results.
• The search engine emphasizes privacy and security during searches.

Cons

• It has a low market share.
• They lure you into downloading their extensions

9. Naver

Naver is a South Korean online platform operated by Naver Corporation, commanding 56.89% of searches in South Korea as of 2021.

It debuted in 1999 as the first web portal in South Korea to develop and use its search engine.

It was also the world’s first search engine to introduce a comprehensive search feature. The feature compiles search results from various categories and presents them on a single page.

Pros

• The search engine is prevalent in South Korea.
• It offers various services, including a news feed, an online dictionary, and an email service.
• Its translate feature is better than Google translate.

Cons

• There is a learning curve to using Naver.

10. AOL

AOL is a web portal and online service provider based in New York. Its founding year was 1995, but Verizon Communications acquired it in 2015 for $4.4 Billion.

AOL Search engine accounts for about 0.06% of the world’s total searches. It has about 243.5 Million monthly active users.

Pros

• The company has an excellent reputation for security and privacy.
• Protects users from phishing websites.
• AOL provides various services, including email, news, weather, entertainment, etc.
• The platform integrates communication tools such as AOL Instant Messenger and America Online.

Cons

• It loads slowly, and the display is far from perfect.

Social Network-Specific Advance Search Engines

Here are the social network search engines.

11. Facebook Search tool

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in February 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Facebook’s 2.9 billion user base makes it the most extensive social network.

The site’s search engine helps you find the people and information you’re looking for.

Pros

• The search tool is very user-friendly and easy to use.
• You can find a lot of information about people and businesses on Facebook.
• The site’s search engine is constantly improving, making it more accurate and effective over time.

Cons

• The site’s search engine can be less effective if you’re not explicitly looking for people or businesses on Facebook.

12. LinkedIn Search tool

LinkedIn is a business- and employment-oriented social networking service owned wholly by Microsoft. It is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs.

The LinkedIn platform has a user base of about 810 million people in more than 200 countries.

Pros

• LinkedIn is great for finding jobs and networking with other professionals.
• The site’s search engine is very user-friendly and easy to use.
• You can find a lot of information about businesses and employees on LinkedIn.

Cons

• LinkedIn is not as good for finding personal information about people as other social networking sites.

13. Twitter Search tool

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking site founded on 21st March 2006 by Jack Dorsey. The site has close to 400 million monthly active users and is among the most popular social networking sites.

The Twitter search tool allows you to find tweets from specific users or about specific topics. Pros

• The search tool is user-friendly and easy to use.
• You can find a lot of information about people and businesses on Twitter.
• The site’s search engine is constantly improving.

Cons

• The large volume of tweets can be challenging to search through.

Image Search Engines

14. Pinterest

Pinterest is a social media site that allows users to share and save images and videos. Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra founded the site in 2010.

Today, Pinterest has over 433 million monthly active users.

The Pinterest search engine helps you find pins or images and filter to narrow your results.

Pros

• It makes it easy to do visual searching.
• The search engine is very user-friendly and easy to use.
• You can find a lot of images on Pinterest.

Cons

• There are only a fewer men who use Pinterest; 80% of its users are women.

15. Google Image

Google Image is a search engine that allows users to search the web for images. Google search engine launched the feature on July 12, 2001, but now 4.3 billion users use it.

The Google Image search engine helps you find images when you type a potential keyword in the search bar.

Pros

• It’s easy to find images using the right keywords.
• You can find a lot of images on Google Images.
• It helps find websites that have features you’d love.

Cons

• The Images may not be very relevant to what you are looking for.

16. Flickr

Flickr is a social media site that allows users to search for images based on visual similarity. Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake founded the site in 2004, but Yahoo acquired it in 2005. Today, Flickr has over 55.7 million monthly visitors.

Pros

• It’s easy to find traffic due to high traffic.
• It makes it easy to do visual searching.
• Flickr stores photos above 16-megapixel quality.
• It’s easy to see the statistics on each photo.

Cons

• There’s a lot of spam on the platform.
• You can’t block sender messages.

Video Search Engine List

17. Youtube

YouTube is a video-sharing website and the second largest search engine worldwide, with over 2.2 billion active users. Three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, founded Youtube on 14th February 2005.

The platform has over 1 billion hours of videos per hour. Jawed Karim uploaded the first video, “Me at the zoo,” on 23rd April 2005.

Pros

• The search engine is very user-friendly and easy to use.
• You can find and download Youtube videos on almost any topic.
• It has a comprehensive database of video content.

Cons

• Inappropriate content is also uploaded.

18. Daily Motion

Daily Motion is the second largest video-sharing website, launched in March 2005. Benjamin Bejbaum and Olivier Poitrey founded the site, which now boasts over 300 million active users.

Daily Motion’s search engine allows you to find videos on any topic with the most traffic from the United States.

Pros

• Features up to 4K quality video.
• Supports all video formats.
• It has a gate to protect kids from sensitive content.
• You can find videos on almost any topic on Daily Motion.
• You can access videos between 2005 and the current date.

Cons

• The maximum video upload is 60 minutes.

19. Google Video

Google Video is a feature on the Google search engine that ranks video content. Google launched the video hosting service on 25th January 2005. This was before Google acquired youtube on 13th November 2006 for $1.65 Billion.

Pros

• The platform is easy to use
• It’s easy to find relevant videos using the Google search engine.
• It also features video content from the Youtube video-sharing platform.
• Google may personalize some of the results.

Cons

• There aren’t many filters for different videos.
• The recommended videos may not necessarily be relevant.

Verdict

So there you have it – 17+ top search engines worldwide across different categories.

Topping the list of the most popular web search engines is Google.

However, don’t forget about all the other great options that could better fit your specific needs.

Try out a few of these alternatives to see which works best for you. And as always, stay tuned to my blog for more tips on scaling your website and driving traffic your way!