List of Web Search Engines - Learn about Yandex, Google, Yahoo and more

Today, Google and other search engines are smarter than ever—they use machine learning to help process and rank information, and can understand natural human speech. But the Internet wasn't always so easy to navigate! There was a time when you had to know the exact wording of a website's title to find it. The results were often riddled with spam. Getting new content indexed by the search engines could take weeks to complete. Web search technology certainly have changed over the last couple of decades. Different Internet search engines use different algorithms for determining which webpages are the most relevant for a particular keyword, and which web pages should appear at the top of the search engine results page. Relevancy is the key for online search engines as users naturally prefer one that will give them the best and most relevant results. Here is FreeOnlineSEOAdvice.com compressive list of Search Engines, enjoy!

Yahoo!

First on our list is Yahoo. In January 1994 Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, one of the pioneers of the early Internet era. They also launched the Yahoo! Directory, which became the first popular Web directory. These days they are still an American web services provider headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and owned by Verizon Media. It provides or provided a Web portal, search engine Yahoo! Search, and related services, including Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. At its height it was one of the most popular sites in the United States. Once one of the largest Internet companies, Yahoo slowly declined starting in the late 2000s.

Infoseek

Not long after Yahoo, Infoseek was launced. It quickly became one of the most popular search engines in the 90s. In 1998, Infoseek was the first Internet company to develop and launch behavioral targeting via its UltraMatch targeting algorithms. Infoseek was originally operated by the Infoseek Corporation, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Infoseek was bought by The Walt Disney Company in 1999, and everything went downhill after that.

Lycos

Also, on our list is Lycos, it is a web search engine and Internet portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. Lycos was one of the most popular websites on the Internet, ranking 8th in 1997, and peaking at 4th in both 1999 and 2001. Having been set back by the dot-com bubble burst, Lycos abandoned its own web crawler in late 2001.

AltaVista

In 1995 AltaVista was launched. It became one of the most-used early search engines, but lost ground to Google and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, which retained the brand, but based all AltaVista searches on its own search engine. On July 8, 2013, the service was shut down by Yahoo! and since then the domain has redirected to Yahoo!'s own website. In 2000, AltaVista was used by 17.7% of Internet users while Google was only used by 7% of Internet users, according to Media Metrix.

Ask Jeeves or Ask.com

Ask Jeeves, a natural language web search engine, that aims to rank links by popularity, is released. It would later become Ask.com. The original software was implemented by Gary Chevsky, from his own design. Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine. In the mid-2000s, the "Jeeves" name was dropped and they refocused on the search engine, which had its own algorithm. In late 2010, facing insurmountable competition from more popular search engines like Google, the company outsourced its web search technology and returned to its roots as a question and answer site. Ask.com has been criticized for its browser toolbar, which has been accused of behaving like malware due to its bundling with other software and the difficulty of its uninstallation.

Bing.com

Bing is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of Internet look up services, including web, video, image and map search products. As of October 2018, Bing is the third largest search engine globally.

Google.com

Expected on a web search engine list like this is Google Search, also referred to as simply Google. It is the most used search engine on the World Wide Web across all platforms, with 92.62% market share as of June 2019, handling more than 5.4 billion searches each day. Google indexes hundreds of terabytes of information from web pages. For websites that are currently down or otherwise not available, Google provides links to cached versions of the site, formed by the search engine's latest indexing of that page. Additionally, Google indexes some file types, being able to show users PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, certain Flash multimedia content, and plain text files. Users can also activate "SafeSearch", a filtering technology aimed at preventing explicit and pornographic content from appearing in the results. Despite Google search's immense index, sources generally assume that Google is only indexing less than 5% of the total Internet, with the rest belonging to the deep web, inaccessible through its look up tools.

Baidu

Baidu is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI). Baidu offers various services, including a Chinese search engine, as well as a mapping service called Baidu Maps. Baidu has the second largest search engine in the world, and held a 76.05% market share in China's search engine market. In December 2007, Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index.

Yandex

Yandex Search is a web search engine owned by Russian corporation Yandex. It is the core product of Yandex. In January 2015 Yandex generated 51.2% of all search traffic in Russia. Their technology provides local results in more than 1,400 cities. Yandex Search also features "parallel" look up that presents results from both main web index and specialized information resources, including news, shopping, blogs, images and videos on a single page.

DuckDuckGo

Last, but not least on our list is DuckDuckGo (also abbreviated as DDG) is an Internet search engine that emphasizes protecting searchers' privacy and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term. DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.