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The Current Search Landscape

Introduction​

Everyone knows Google is the big name in search, followed distantly by Bing. But what about the rest of the search landscape? Are there other competitors out there? If so, are they attempting anything similar to NextSearch or do they have other innovative ways of improving search results that might eliminate the need for NextSearch?

This document attempts to address these questions and to provide a fairly thorough evaluation of the currently available search options. Feel free to skip on to the lists of search engines below but we also wanted to provide some information on our methodology for those who may be interested why certain sites do and don't appear on this list.

We'd love to hear from you if we've missed any engines or if you have reasons why we've miscategorized an engine. You can reach us via twitter @nextwebsearch or via email at [email protected].

Methodology​

The search landscape is not unitary and straightforward. That is, one is often not comparing apples to apples when looking at different search engines. For example:

  • Some search engines have a tremendous user base and pose a signficant challenge to any new search entrant while other search engines are quite small and unknown.
  • Some search engines handle what are considered to be the three core aspects of web search: (1) a crawler (that finds and indexes sites), (2) the index (which contains indexed sites, assigned rankings, relationships, etc.) and (3) the search interface (the website through which a user makes a search query).
  • Other search engines only implement some of the three outlined above. This usually occurs when a search engine provides a unique interface but behind the scenes is drawing on the index of another engine. Mojeek's Search Engine Map provides a helpful visualization of the various search engines and how they relate to one another.
  • Among these search engines pulling from other engines' indexes there are some that essentially provide the results almost exactly as provided to them and others who run their own algorithms on top of the base index to improve the results further.
  • Some search engines are "meta" - that is they query against multiple search engines, sometimes combining the results to determine their own unique ranking.
  • And technically, there are many search engines outside of web search - there are local site searches (e.g., searching for articles on Wikipedia), vertical search sites (that cover a limited number of topics), and so on.
  • Finally, there are search directories which may cover all topics but where the results are usually limited and often human curated.

To make our review of the landscape finite we will focus on two types of sites:

  1. Those that are highly popular.
  2. Those which bring unique functionality to the table.

This affects our survey in two significant ways:

  1. Sites which are somewhat popular AND don't offer unique functionality will not be represented in a meaningful way. For example, while we include DuckDuckGo in our contender listings a number of other less popular privacy engines aren't addressed due to their functionality being available in DDG. Examples of sites that fell under this exclusion include Searchalot, Gibiru, DiscreteSearch, etc.
  2. Sites which are highly popular but are no longer considered serious search contenders. You can look at Appendix B to see a bit about the history of search engines and the various acquisitions that occurred. Oftentimes these acquisitions resulted in the acquired becoming a shell of its own self.

We've provided additional footnotes regarding why certain sites are/are not on the list below.

The Winner​

The Contenders​

Search EngineSimilarWeb RankVerified
Microsoft Bing#3008/2022
DuckDuckGo#3908/2022
Baidu (China)#608/2022
Yandex (Russia)#14708/2022

Second Tier Competitors​

Search EngineSimilarWeb RankVerified
Yahoo#1308/2022
Ask#188108/2022
Ecosia (Germany)#27508/2022
Startpage (Netherlands)#92808/2022
SearchEncrypt#2576508/2022
Qwant (France)#163908/2022
Lycos#6827408/2022
ZapMeta (Netherlands)#6957508/2022
EntireWeb (Sweden)#15488408/2022
Dogpile#2006408/2022
InfoSpace#66903208/2022
Exalead (France)#68185708/2022
Gigablast#30497108/2022
Metager (German)#7123608/2022
ExactSeek#59280408/2022
Yippy#42940208/2022
MillionShort#34686808/2022
Mojeek (UK)#7438208/2022
Lilo (France)#1609408/2022
Presearch#614408/2022
Brave Search#38508/2022
You#2266308/2022
Yep#28767108/2022

Third Tier Competitors​

Search EngineSimilarWeb RankVerified
eTools (Switzerland)#27988108/2022
Active Search Results#73163408/2022
Searx (Hungary)#48888808/2022
Whaleslide (UK)#690460108/2022

The Rest​

None of the below sites are within the top 130k sites according to Alexa (12/2019). We may move Searx (open source) onto our list of contenders after further evaluation. Most of the other sites are privacy oriented sites that don't show significant differentiation from DDG.

Additional Notes on Particular Search Engines​

DuckDuckGo​

See C.1. DuckDuckGo.

Yahoo​

Yahoo is quite high for web traffic but it has long outsourced its search results to Bing. We are not aware of any significant innovations Yahoo is making to the Bing results before displaying them and we are unaware of any such innovations on the horizon. However, the high traffic does mean that it could easily innovate on the search front and become a competitor.

Ask​

Ask pulls from Google, similarly to how Yahoo pulls from Bing. Again, we don't see significant innovations layered on top of the Google results nor any such on the horizon. As with Yahoo, Ask could quickly become a competitor if it so chose.

Ecosia​

Ecosia sources its results from Bing and is a similar situation to Yahoo/Ask. It is included at the second tier level because of the high traffic, its emphasis on earth-friendly / social good.

Startpage​

Startpage uses Google results, is similar DDG, but has enough traffic to make it a potentially serious competitor.

Startpage is descended from Ixquick which was a meta search engine.

Search Encrypt​

Search Encrypt is similar to Startpage and DDG. It uses Bing for results and again is listed because of its high traffic.

Qwant​

Qwant uses Bing results to supplement its own index, offers a Boards application which allows for sharing and annotating web content.

Dogpile​

Dogpile is a meta search engine (owned by InfoSpace), one of the older engines on the net. It doesn't seem to be particularly distinguished from others but could probably offer competition if it placed energies towards significant innovation.

Gigablast​

Gigablast could easily have been excluded from this list. It appears to have stagnated to a large extent.

Metager​

Started At: University of Hanover
Founded: 1996

Metager is part of the non-profit organization SUMA-EV. While not the highest trafficked apparently pulls results from numerous search engines (aka, it is meta),and offers some helpful customization options for results. It has released its source code as open source, and offers privacy. Impressive!

Yippy​

Yippy is powered by IBM Watson, uses Bing for at least some of tis results, its most interesting feature is its ability to cluster results into topics - e.g., searching for "Civil War" one might be interested in the American Civil War, the comic book movie, a civil war in another country, etc. Yippy helps one quickly filter out irrelevant results.

MillionShort​

While technically ahead of Yippy it has been included after because while we love the idea of trimming off a million search results to find new content it is unlikely one actually wants to write off the top million results in many use cases.

Whaleslide​

Whaleslide is lowly trafficked according to Alexa but the site seems to offer some innovative features. In addition to donating to non-profits with revenue generated, its site design is slick and performant, one can "pin sites" and also add them to collections, and it is privacy focused.

Infospace​

InfoSpace appears to pull results from Bing. It is also the owner of Dogpile and WebCrawler.

eTools​

eTools is included not because of high traffic but due to the customizability of the engine. It is a metasearch engine that can query 16 different search engines and allows the user to determine the weight of each engine. It also shows in the results which search engines returned which results (including when multiple returned the same result).

Active Search Results (ASR)​

Normally we'd have put ASR into the second tier results, but at least for us the search results relevance wasn't very high, so we'll leave them third tier (due to the significant traffic they receive), but will need to see improved results before we'd consider moving them to second tier.

Additional Resources​