Internet search engines are tools that you can use to find information. In recent years, the phrase “searching on the Internet” has been replaced by the word “to google”, as Google is the most popular search engine worldwide. But it is not the only one. Check this ranking of the Internet search engines and try them by yourself!
What is search engine? How it works?
A search engine helps you to find information on the Internet. You type words into a search box. Then, it gives you many websites that match your words. Search engines work using special programs. These programs check many websites to find the best results for you. Some programs visit websites and collect information. Other programs sort this information and decide how important it is. The final component is the search engine interface. It is the user-facing part that displays the search results.
Search engines are important for online marketing. Websites use SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO helps websites appear higher in search results. If you have a website, good SEO and using SEO-friendly hosting helps your website become easier to find online. The first step will be to place your website on an SEO-Friendly VPS Hosting.
Ranking of Search Engine Popularity
Google is the most popular search engine in the world. 92% of people online use Google. It started in 1996 when two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, made a new way to find websites. Their idea was called PageRank. In 1998, they created Google.com. By 2004, Google was already the biggest search engine.
Google has many extra tools. You can search for pictures, maps, videos, or use voice search. Google also gives you Gmail, YouTube, Chrome browser, Google Maps, Google Ads, and many other tools.
Bing
Bing is owned by Microsoft. It started in 2009. Bing is used mostly on Windows computers. It is easy to use with the Edge browser. Bing is similar to Google. It also has image, video, and map searches. Bing now uses artificial intelligence (AI), called ChatGPT. AI made Bing more popular.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! was very popular before. It started in 1994. But now fewer people use it. In 2009, 6% used Yahoo!, but now only about 1.5% use it. Yahoo! is popular in Japan (17.4% users). In the United States, it still has over 3% users. Since 2016, Yahoo! is owned by Verizon Media, the same company that owns AOL.
Baidu
Google is not popular in China. It was blocked in China in 2010 because of government rules. Baidu is now the biggest search engine in China. Baidu started in 2000. It only works in the Chinese language. Many people in China use it (almost 500 million users). Baidu follows Chinese government rules. This means it blocks results about democracy or human rights.
Yandex
Yandex is an acronym for “Yet Another iNDEXer”. It is popular in Russia (over 47% use it). Yandex has maps, video searches, cloud storage, and translation tools. It is also used in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo cares about your privacy. It does not share your personal data. DuckDuckGo does not track you. It keeps your searches private. It has become more popular because people worry about privacy online. About 2.6% of people in the United States use it.
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Ask.com
Ask.com started in 1996 as “Ask Jeeves”. You could ask questions and get answers from people. Nowadays about 50 million people use it monthly, mostly in the US, UK, and Japan. Unfortunately for many people a big disadvante is a toolbar “Ask Toolbar”. Many people has big problems with removing it. Since 2010, Ask.com uses Google results.
AOL Search
AOL started in 1983. It was a big company around the year 2000. AOL bought Time Warner for a lot of money. Later, AOL lost many users and had problems. In 2006, AOL accidentally shared data from 650,000 users. Verizon owns AOL since 2015.
Qwant
Qwant started in France in 2013. It also cares about user privacy. Qwant uses Bing search results. Many people (around 50 million every month) choose it to stay private online.
Ecosia
Ecosia is special because it plants trees when you use it. Money from searches helps plant trees. It uses search results from Microsoft (Bing). It takes about 45 searches to plant one tree. Ecosia planted over 120 million trees already. People who care about nature use Ecosia. On their homepage, you can witness the impact of user activity, with over 120 million trees already planted. Ecosia is the perfect choice for people concerned about the high levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
Dogpile
I’ve covered an environmentally conscious search engine, so now let’s talk about a service that supports animals. Dogpile, created by Aaron Flin in 1996, gathers information from Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, and the revenue it generates is directed toward supporting charitable organizations focused on animal welfare.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha was published in 2009. It is not a typical search engine. It specializes in providing answers to queries formulated in natural language. Additionally, it excels in handling mathematical language, making it a powerful tool for performing calculations and solving complex equations.
Conclusion
The massive triumph of Google in the global search engine market is a highly intricate subject. It owes much of its success to the development of PageRank. Its simplicity in usability and unassuming appearance, coupled with lightning-fast speed, further contributed to its popularity.
Competition also played a role in shaping the landscape. Other search engine providers failed to seize the opportunities and untapped potential of Internet search engines during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Microsoft’s search engine only gained independence in 2009, while Yahoo!, due to a series of ill-advised decisions, found itself in dire straits that led to the company’s eventual sale.
Our brief overview of the world’s most popular search engines has revealed that despite Google’s dominance, a portion of users gravitates towards alternative solutions that offer enhanced privacy. These alternatives continue to attract new supporters as they strive to meet the evolving needs of users in an ever-changing digital landscape.
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