Search Engines: An Overview of the Most Popular Search Engines in the World

15 min read

Search engines are one of the most useful and powerful tools on the internet today. Using algorithms, databases, and real-time searches, these engines comb through the vast amount of information available on the internet and present ordered results related to or containing the user’s query.

Since the resulting list is ordered, it stands to reason that there are certain principles guiding how links are ordered on that list, and this system is particularly important to consider for individuals trying to generate more traffic for their website or ecommerce business.

In a nutshell, links appear higher in a search engine’s results page based on the number of other pages linking to them, the quality of the pages doing the linking, and the number and position of links on the linking page. If many high-quality websites link to your site and place your link near the top of their pages, then it’s likely your page will appear high in the search engine list.

If you’re interested in learning more about the web’s best search engines, keep reading! In this article, we’ll cover internet search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo by digging into their history, capabilities, and key statistics. We’ll even cover some search engines other than Google that you might not be as familiar with, like Baidu and Yandex. Since all of these search engines are free to use, you can try out each one and decide for yourself which search engine you think is best.

Google

How many times have you heard someone say “just Google it?” Google is so ubiquitous that it is one of the few companies whose name has been adopted into modern parlance as a verb. In 2006, Google was added to the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb meaning “to use the Google search engine to find information on the internet.”

Did you know that the name Google was created by intentionally misspelling googol, a mathematical term that represents the number one followed by one-hundred zeros? This name was chosen by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to symbolize the massive potential for the internet’s expansion and connections between various webpages.

Page and Brin first launched a search engine called BackRub on Stanford University’s private network in August of 1996. In 1998, the pair changed the name to Google and incorporated because they realized that their search engine would become more useful as the internet continued to grow.

Eric Schmidt joined Google as its CEO in 2001 and guided the company through the acquisition of YouTube and the development of features like Google Docs and Gmail.

By 2004, Google had risen to a high level of profitability due to its capability for web advertising, and the company went public with stock shares priced at eighty-five dollars. Fast forward to 2022 and Google is worth more than one trillion dollars.

Today, Google holds a staggering 85 percent of the worldwide market share. This means that—out of the billions of internet searches performed every day—85 percent of them are done using Google’s search engine. This comes out to a daily total of about seven billion searches every day.

Try to Google Google. Sounds weird.

One downside of Google is the quantity of information it collects about its users. Experts have raised privacy concerns over Google’s amassing of user data, which it also shares with third-party sites and which is subject to—for US users—being claimed by the US government under the Patriot Act. That said, for ecommerce businesses, Google can be a helpful tool in identifying new customers and advertising your products or services.

Bing

When thinking about search engines other than Google, Bing or Yahoo are typically the search engines that come to mind—at least in the United States. In terms of market share percentages, Bing is Google’s closest competitor, with 8 percent.

Bing is a search engine that was launched in 2009 by Microsoft. While Microsoft previously had a search engine called Live Search, it was not able to keep up with competitors Google and Yahoo!. Bing was created to offer an enhanced search engine that could potentially close the gap between Microsoft and other search engine creators.

Bing was marketed as a decision engine, a search engine designed to display more information in its results list than its competitors. Bing’s search engine provided more detailed link previews, suggested alternate searches, and originally showed a user’s search history on the left side of the page.

In some cases, Bing was able to display enough information on the results page to answer your question, which meant you wouldn’t have to click through a number of links to get the answers you needed.

Today, Bing is worth four billion dollars and sees nine-hundred million searches per day. While the search engine is used by fewer people overall, there are a few key features that help Bing remain one of the best search engines out there.

For example, Bing’s visual and video search options allow users greater flexibility and produce more accurate results. When searching for images, Bing allows users to find similar images to something you’ve uploaded, dragged from your desktop, or even snapped a picture with your phone or webcam. They also have more prompts to explore images, which can help you find visuals that you didn’t know how to search for.

Well, that’s a lot of info here!

Bing’s video search is well organized, allowing users to scroll horizontally through thumbnails. Once you’ve found the video you want, Bing’s search engine allows you to play the video in full-screen mode without having to visit a host website like YouTube. For people wanting the best search engine or a search engine other than google, Bing’s features offer a compelling case for making the switch.

Yahoo!

The exclamation point in Yahoo!’s name isn’t the only thing to get excited about when it comes to this internet search engine. Yahoo! Comes in a percentage point below Bing with a market share of 2.5 percent and roughly five-hundred and sixty billion daily searches.

Like Google, Yahoo! was founded at Stanford University. Jerry Yang and David Filo developed the search engine in 1994, originally calling it “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” As opposed to a searchable database, the “Guide” was an organized directory of websites.

Yang and Filo soon realized that brevity was an important factor to consider when naming a website and utilizing the internet, so they shortened their site’s name to Yahoo!, which was a stand-in for the longer title: “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle.”

Yahoo!’s market value was at an all-time high in 2000 at one-hundred and eighteen dollars per share, but the value quickly crashed to just above eight dollars the following year.

In 2009, Yahoo! formed a deal with Microsoft to use Bing to power the search engine on its portal site. While this deal lapsed for a period of time, as of October 2019 Yahoo! is once again powered by Bing. While still functionally a search engine, what this means is that Yahoo! is technically a portal site, which delivers Bing’s search engine results to users.

Yahoo! It’s yahoo! Or is it?

Today, Yahoo! has an estimated net worth of five billion dollars. One of their most popular features is their news aggregating portal, which ranked ninth in online traffic for a news and media site. When it comes to deciding the best internet search engine, Yahoo! might not be most people’s top choice, but the site still holds onto a large share of the market and offers other helpful features that users enjoy.

Yandex

While we’ve been discussing internet search engines owned by US based companies, there are also search engines popular in countries outside of the US that control a significant portion of the worldwide market share. Coming in at 1.27 percent is the Russian search engine Yandex. While this may seem like a small portion of the worldwide market, Yandex is the leading search engine within Russia, with sixty to seventy million visits every day. Yandex often rivals and exceeds Google as the best search engine in Russia, and the site is accessible to US users as well.

Yandex was created by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich. The name, like Yahoo!, is a stand-in for the longer title “Yet Another Indexer” or “Ya Index,” with Ya meaning I am in Russian. The Yandex search engine was first announced by CompTek in 1997, but it wasn’t until 2001 that Yandex became Russia’s leading internet search engine.

Like Google, Yandex offers email services, online advertising, a maps service, data management, and analytics. Yandex has even partnered with Uber to create Yandex.Taxi. Today, the company is valued at nearly twenty-three billion dollars.

In Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Ukraine, and several other countries, Yandex is Google’s primary competitor, typically occupying the second place position in terms of market shares. This may be due to a large number of Russian-speaking individuals who live in or travel to these countries, but Yandex also has an English-language dot com site.

Wow, that’s a lot of free space! You won’t see this in other search engines.

What gives Yandex an edge, particularly in Russia, is that the site was designed for Russian language and grammar. Russian nouns are gendered and there are other grammatical nuances that alter the meaning of a word or phrase, which Google cannot interpret as readily as a search engine designed specifically for the language.

For Russian speaking individuals, or those internet users looking to access a more global search engine, Yandex is likely the best search engine available.

Baidu

Rounding out our list is a search engine based in China. Baidu’s search engine currently controls around 1 percent of the global market shares. Baidu was incorporated by Robin Li and Eric Xu in 2000 and is one of the world’s largest AI and internet companies. In China, Baidu controls over 75 percent of the market share and attracts more than two-hundred million users every day.

The search engine’s name can be translated to mean “a hundred times” or “countless times” and is derived from a quote from the last line of Xin Qiji’s classical poem Green Jade Table in the Lantern Festival.

The company offers the internet search engine, a maps service, and is involved in a number of other AI technologies, including a robocar concept capable of Level Five autonomous driving. While users in China make up the lion’s share of Baidu’s search engine traffic, US and Japanese users make up the second and third highest rates of traffic.

Just… not for everyone.

While Baidu may not be the search engine of choice for many US users, it’s still an important global company and search engine with a considerable market share and a net worth of over fifty-seven billion.

The Best Search Engines

What makes the best search engine? You could argue that the best internet search engine has the highest number of users, the fastest time to produce results, the largest database of information, or the greatest ease of use. Ultimately, the best search engine is the one that meets your specific needs.

Based on numbers alone, Google comes out ahead as the top search engine, and there are certainly good reasons for its widespread use. Any information you’re interested in can be found with a few taps of your keys, and Google easily links to your favorite sites (and sites you didn’t even know were out there).

But other search engines offer similar capabilities and may have winning features like a sleeker look, better image search, or greater compatibility with the language you speak.

It’s also worth noting that there are great search engines out there that didn’t make this list. Search engines like DuckDuckGo with smaller market shares attract users by promising high levels of privacy and data protection. Ecosia donates the majority of its profits to planting trees, so every search there helps the environment.

The great thing about search engines is that you can research the best search engines while using the search engines you’re researching! With every search and every click, you’re getting a feel for the best search engine and can make an informed decision about which internet search engine is right for you.

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Apr 1, 2022

About the author

Max has been working in the ecommerce industry for the last six years helping brands to establish and level-up content marketing and SEO. Despite that, he has experience with entrepreneurship. He is a fiction writer in his free time.