16 Top Search Engines in 2025 (Including Google Alternatives)

What are the top search engines in the world? It depends on what you’re looking for.

Slowly disappearing are the days when just one search engine dominates over the rest. The Internet is fragmenting, and people may choose a search engine over others because of specific use cases.

So, here are the top search engines, classified by categories:

These are the most popular search engines in the world, as seen by their worldwide market share.

1. Google

With 89.79% of the global market share, Google still remains the number one search engine in the world.

But no thanks to privacy concerns, antitrust issues, creating filter bubbles, and competition from AI search engines, Google has seen its market share decline. In January 2024, only one year ago, Google had a 91.47% market share. It’s still at the top, but it’s slowly falling off.

However, Google is not resting on its laurels. Fighting back with AI Overviews, and CEO Sundar Pichai commenting that Google search will become more of an AI assistant, we’ll have to see if Google can continue to stay at the top for the next decade.

2. Bing

Chasing Google’s shadow, Bing takes #2 at 3.93% of the global search engine market share.

Despite the large gap in market share, Bing has always been Google’s closest search engine rival. Besides the user interface, there’s nothing really different about Bing. It has image and video search, maps, news, and similar SERP features like featured snippets.

It also has ‘AI Overviews’:

The days when Bing was only used to search for “Google Chrome download” are slowly gone. Bing now hides its search results if you look for Google. Meanwhile, striking while the iron is hot, Microsoft embraced AI rapidly, adding their own LLM (Copilot) as a search tab and integrating new features like Deep Search:

3.93% may be nothing in the search engine pie, but it’s a number that has been increasing. Also, Bing powers most of the alternative search engines, so its market share number may actually be larger than you expect.

3. Yandex

Coming in third place at 2.73% is the Russia-based search engine Yandex.

Its piece of the pie may look tiny, but if you narrow it down to just Russia, Yandex becomes #1 at 73.71%, beating Google. (Some lesson in here about niching down.)

Like Google, it also has similar products, including image and video search, maps, translate, weather, and email. However, it has one product that even Google doesn’t have: Yandex Taxi (ridesharing). It is the biggest ridesharing company in Russia, and I even used it when I visited Uzbekistan two years ago. Very easy to use, just like Uber and Grab in Singapore.

Two years ago, Yandex’s source code was leaked online, including some of their ranking factors. SEOs naturally went crazy, and several SEO thought leaders attempted to investigate and break down what they found.

However, as far as I know with regards to the leaks, nothing much has changed in how SEO is done.

4. Yahoo

In the most surprising news since Manchester City lost five games in a row, Yahoo still exists. Not only does it exist, but it’s still fourth (1.27%) in the global search engine game.

Once the #1 ‘search engine’ in the world, it’s now a shell of itself. Its index is powered by Bing and it’s owned by Apollo Global Management, an asset management company.

While I do not know a single person who uses Yahoo the search engine, I do know many people who read news articles on Yahoo and also refer to its finance section.

Currently, according to Statista, Yahoo has the dubious honor of leading the ranking of the most compromised data records in selected data breaches worldwide. Not a good sign for a search engine.

5. Baidu

In fifth place, we have Baidu, the Chinese search engine at 0.71% market share.

Like Yandex, while it only has a small portion of the global market share, it’s #1 when you narrow it down to China. It is essentially the Google of China. (Incredibly, Bing is also doing well.)

While many people think of Baidu as a copy of Google, it isn’t. Baidu’s founder, Robin Li, created the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for page ranking (the basis of Baidu) in 1996. RankDex was referenced two years later by Larry Page, when he filed the patent for PageRank.

Like the Western search engines, Baidu has also moved quickly, working with DeepSeek R1 to provide AI-powered search and other features:

6. DuckDuckGo

At number six we have DuckDuckGo, with 0.67% of the market share.

Named after the children’s game, DuckDuckGo is the most well-known private search engine. Private because DuckDuckGo doesn’t use any tracking cookies or store your personal data, like your IP addresses.

While DuckDuckGo doesn’t have its own crawler and gets its search results from over 400 sources, DuckDuckGo assures all of us that it doesn’t share our personal information with them.

The most interesting feature that DuckDuckGo has, and other mainstream search engines don’t, is its “Bangs” feature. Typing one of these “bangs” sends you directly to a search result. For example, !w and a keyword like “SEO” sends you directly to the page on SEO on Wikipedia.

Mainstream search engines are convenient, easy to use, and the go-to for most people. But they have downsides, the most prominent of which is privacy.

Mainstream search engines track your data and share it across their various services. Some have also been known to cooperate with government surveillance programs.

If you’re wary of big tech, want to protect your digital privacy, but still want to use search, you’ll have to use private search engines.

DuckDuckGo is the most famous private search engine, but there are other alternatives too.

1. Brave Search

Brave Search is developed by the same people behind Brave browser, a privacy-focused browser. Its founders include Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla Firefox, and Brian Bondy, a former senior platform engineer at Mozilla.

At first glance, Brave Search doesn’t look too dissimilar from Google. It has similar features like image and video search, news, and SERP features like “Discussions”, which showcases threads from Reddit:

It also has “AI Overviews”, but with a slight twist—you can ask further questions:

If you’re ever unsatisfied with Brave’s search results, they provide the option of turning to Google, Bing, or Mojeek:

You can also modify Brave Search’s rankings using their Goggles feature—a set of rules and filters:

If you dislike their pre-built Goggles, you can make your own:

Unlike other alternative search engines, Brave Search doesn’t rely on Google or Bing for its SERPs. It uses its own index with the aid of the Web Discovery Project.

2. Startpage

Predominantly using search results from Google, Startpage used to literally be Google without the tracking. However, in 2023, they announced that they were also partnering with MapQuest, HERE Technologies, Priceline, Tomorrow.io, Search Expander, and Microsoft Bing.

Despite their wide range of partners, they assure users that they do not use any tracking cookies and anonymize all queries before pulling SERPs from their partners. For additional reassurance, Startpage is based in the Netherlands, where they comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a European Union regulation that protects users’ data.

For even further insurance, their “Anonymous View” feature lets you visit websites from their search results anonymously.

If you like the clean UX that Google offers but dislike the big tech tracking, Startpage is an obvious choice.

3. Yep

Made by Ahrefs (that’s us), Yep is a privacy-oriented search engine that only collects personal data when you voluntarily provide it to us, e.g., when you contact us for customer support. Otherwise, we store nothing permanently: not your search history, your IP address, nor User-Agent strings.

Unlike most alternative search engines which get their SERPs from Bing, our index is populated by our own crawler. In fact, we have the most active web crawler in the SEO industry and it’s also the second most active crawler in the world.

That means we discover new pages and refresh our index all the time.

Another unique thing about Yep is that we’re creator-friendly. Our plan is a 90/10 revenue share model, where 90% of advertising revenue will be paid directly to creators. It’s our counter to Google and other mainstream search engines “stealing” content from hardworking creators (to create their SERP features and AI Overviews) and not crediting nor rewarding them.

It’s still in beta, but try it and let us know what you think!

4. Kagi

Most alternative search engines are just a slight twist on Google, e.g. removing tracking but still serving results from them. Kagi, however, has decided to rethink the entire business model from the ground-up.

After all, why do search engines need to track you? It’s because of the standard search engine business model: search is free, so search engines make money via ads instead. To serve better ads and help advertisers reach customers efficiently, search engines need data.

But what if search isn’t free? What if search worked more like SaaS, where people pay a monthly subscription to access it? That way, Kagi could keep search private without any need for tracking.

Paying for search may sound preposterous to many people, but it works. As of February 25, 2025, Kagi has 40,648 paying members.

5. Mojeek

One of the earliest private search engines, Mojeek was the first search engine to have a no tracking privacy policy back in 2006. It also uses its own search index, currently standing at over six billion pages.

There’s nothing fancy about Mojeek—just a simple interface with links, image search, news, and an AI summary for the top web results.

It does have one unique feature: emotion-based search. In partnership with EMRAYS Technologies, you can enter a keyword and search by emotion on Mojeek:

With AI taking over the world, more people are moving away from mainstream search engines like Google and moving to AI ones, including myself.

Even though many mainstream search engines today have AI elements, like Google’s AI Overviews or Bing’s Deep Research, but these are search engines that are predominantly AI-based.

1. Perplexity

An AI-powered conversational search engine, Perplexity works like Google’s AI Overviews, but on steroids. Ask it any question or even just enter a keyword, and Perplexity will generate answers with citations in the output.

You can also ask Perplexity to focus only on certain types of sources, like web results, academic papers, or Reddit discussions:

Perplexity is set to Auto mode naturally, but you also get five enhanced queries every day. Enhanced queries means you get to choose from Perplexity’s own Pro Search (which looks at more sources and even clarifies questions) to reasoning models from OpenAI and DeepSeek.

They also recently released Deep Research, where Perplexity will perform dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report. It’s a competitor to OpenAI’s new feature, also called Deep Research.

To get more queries, you can sign up for their Pro version.

2. ChatGPT

I’m 99% sure you’re familiar with ChatGPT. Even if you’re not using it as a search engine, you’re probably using it as a coding partner, help you with your homework, or automate your tasks.

But it works as a search engine too. If ChatGPT determines an answer would benefit from current information, it automatically searches the web. However, you can also click the web search icon to get ChatGPT to search the web, which makes it function as a search engine.

ChatGPT also recently released Deep Research, an agent that will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources using its reasoning models to create a comprehensive report. The feature has been getting good reviews online:

After DeepSeek (see below) shook the AI world with its speed and accuracy (at a lower training cost), OpenAI quickly released its cost-efficient reasoning model, o3-mini-high to the public.

3. DeepSeek

Essentially China’s answer to ChatGPT, DeepSeek is a Hangzhou-based chatbot founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a hedge fund co-founder.

First released on 10 January 2025, it shocked the entire AI world by providing responses comparable to OpenAI’s o1. Not only was DeepSeek not operated by a full-time AI company (e.g., OpenAI), it was apparently also trained at a much, much lower cost (US$6 million) compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4 ($100 million). It requires a tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM.

DeepSeek’s release contributed to the largest drop in U.S. stock market history, even wiping away $600 billion in market value for Nvidia. Crazy. We’re really in an AI arms race now.

Anyway, like ChatGPT, toggling the web search icon turns DeepSeek into a search engine.

Search engines are notorious polluters—an estimate suggests that Google is accountable for ~40% of the internet’s carbon footprint.

Every search contributes to climate change. If you’re concerned, then consider these search engines.

1. Ecosia

Powered by Bing, the Berlin-based search engine Ecosia pledges to donate 80% of profits to tree-planting projects. This is roughly one tree for every 45 searches.

As of February 1, 2024, Ecosia claims to have planted more than 200 million trees.

For further reassurance to its cause, Ecosia also built their own solar plants so that their servers can run on clean power. Pretty cool.

To highlight environmentally friendly companies, they also point them out in the search results with a green leaf:

They also point out ‘polluting’ companies with a fossil fuel icon:

In 2024, Ecosia announced that it’ll partner with Paris-based private search engine Qwant to develop their own European search index.

2. Ekoru

Add the Ekoru Chrome extension to your browser and it turns every new tab you open into an Ekoru search. Or more accurately, a Yahoo search as Ekoru essentially redirects to Yahoo (which is powered by Bing by the way).

Confusing, I know. Welcome to the world of alternative search engines.

The only reason you’ll do that is because you care about Ekoru’s cause: they’re pledging to donate 60% of their revenue to ocean conservation. When you click on an ad, the money goes to Big Blue Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit dedicated to cleaning waterways, coastal areas, and oceans, and Operation Posidonia, an initiative led by the University of New South Wales to replant ocean seagrass.

Ekoru is also powered by hydroelectricity to ensure they do not generate any CO2 emissions.

Final thoughts

This list is comprised of search engines that call themselves search engines. But you don’t have to label yourself as a search engine to function as one.

In fact, for the younger generation, social media has replaced their concept of ‘search engines’.

For example, a 2024 study by Adobe suggested that 1 in 10 Gen Zers rely on TikTok more than Google as a search engine. And people may turn directly to YouTube to look for videos, rather than use an ‘intermediary’ search engine.

Anecdotally, I’ve also heard from my Chinese friends that Baidu is increasingly no longer the go-to search engine. Young people today use Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) or Xiaohongshu.

These numbers are not reflected in search engine market share numbers because they’re not technically search engines. But as long as you use them like one, they are search engines.