Awesome Search Engines

A curated list of search engines and various other resources related to search engines. Pull requests are welcome!

Table of Contents

• The Search Engines
• Domain Specific
  • Coding
  • Forums
• Dead, Dying, or Broken
• The Rest
• Bibliographical Resources
• Footnotes

Building Search Engines

For information on building web-scale search engines see BuildingSearchEngines.md.

The Search Engines

Search Engine	SimilarWeb Rank	Verified	Footnotes
Google	#1	02/2023
Baidu (China)	#6	02/2023
Yahoo	#13	02/2023	1
Microsoft Bing	#31	02/2023
DuckDuckGo	#41	02/2023
Yandex (Russia)	#127	02/2023
Brave Search	#270	02/2023
Ecosia (Germany)	#276	02/2023
Startpage (Netherlands)	#1000	02/2023	2
Qwant (France)	#1730	02/2023	3
Ask	#1926	02/2023	4
Perplexity AI	#3147	05/2023	5
You	#4474	02/2023
Presearch	#7472	02/2023
Lilo (France)	#16471	02/2023
Neeva	#17139	02/2023	6
Dogpile	#24440	02/2023	7
swisscows (Switzerland)	#24135	02/2023	8
SearchEncrypt	#38205	02/2023
Lycos	#55916	02/2023
Mojeek (UK)	#69704	02/2023
Metager (German)	#83554	02/2023	9
Petal Search	#86984	03/2023
ZapMeta (Netherlands)	#97870	02/2023
Gibiru	#104756	02/2023	10
Kagi	#120945	02/2023	11
Andi	#188095	03/2023	12
EntireWeb (Sweden)	#205503	02/2023
HotBot	#208525	03/2023	13
All the Internet	#247183	02/2023	14
eTools (Switzerland)	#269564	02/2023	15
Gigablast	#272122	02/2023	16
MillionShort	#325399	02/2023
Yep	#510628	02/2023
Searx (Hungary)	#585839	02/2023
Active Search Results	#620884	02/2023
Marginalia	#620995	02/2023	17
Wiby	#696409	02/2023	18
Exalead (France)	#721200	02/2023
ExactSeek	#771267	02/2023
Anoox	#880484	03/2023
Oscobo (UK)	#909230	02/2023	19
InfinitySearch	#1095110	03/2023
Secret Search Engine Labs	#1110512	03/2023
Yippy	#1379969	02/2023	20
InfoSpace	#1404982	02/2023	21
Crawlson	#7364693	03/2023
MWMBL	#8970638	03/2023	22
Whaleslide (UK)	#9034368	02/2023	23
Yioop	#9886503	03/2023
Alexandria	#10585468	03/2023	24

Domain Specific

Coding

Search Engine	SimilarWeb Rank	Verified	Footnotes
Phind	#86270	03/2023	25
grep.app	#235205	03/2023
searchcode	#462786	03/2023

Forums

Search Engine	SimilarWeb Rank	Verified	Footnotes
CrowdView	#289199	03/2023

Wikis

• Wiki.com

Reddit

• Redditle.com

Dead, Dying, or Broken

• DiscreteSearch - As of 2/2023 the SSL cert is invalid and only sponsored results are appearing for at least some queries.
• Teclis - As of 2/2023 seems to be superseded by Kagi.
• Olda'vista - As of 3/2023 the site no longer seems to load. (Author: Eric Mackrodt)

The Rest

DuckDuckGo Based

• Disconnect - Just a search box that uses DuckDuckGo.

Google Based

• Lukol - A Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) with anonymization.

Meta Search

• MonsterCrawler

Searx

• Trom.tf - Runs on Searx.

Indie

• SearchMySite - Indexes the indie web, open source.

Bibliographical Resources

• The Search Engine Map. Mojeek.
• Paul Gil's The Best Search Engines of 2019. Lifewire, 2019.
  • We probably wouldn't include Google Scholar as a separate entry or Webopedia at all.
• Wikipedia's List of Search Engines.
• Alex Chris' Top 10 Search Engines in the World. Reliablesoft, 2019.
• Chuck Price's 14 Great Search Engines You Can Use Instead of Google. Search Engine Journal, 2018.
  • We wouldn't include Wiki.com, Twitter, CC Search, Boardreader, or Slideshare.
• Matteo Duo's 21 Alternative Search Engines to Use in 2019. Kinsta, 2019.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. 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. ↩

2. 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. ↩

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

4. 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. ↩

5. AI based search similar to Google's Bard and Bing's Chat. Some of the founders have backgrounds at Google, Quora, and Databricks. ↩

6. An ad-free search engine. Offers a limited free account with subscription accounts less than $6/mo. Provides some customizability of search results by selecting preferred sources (e.g. The New York Times, Wikipedia). ↩

7. 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. ↩

8. A well-established, anonymous search engine. ↩

9. Metager is part of the non-profit organization SUMA-EV. It was started at the University of Hanover in 1996. 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! ↩

10. According to the site it has been operating since 2009 and provides "uncensored private search." At the footer of search results it states it is an "Anonymous Proxy Search Engine." This likely indicates that the results are pulled ffrom elsewhere but anonymized. The results also include a tab "Censored Content" though it is unclear what exactly makes the content censored. ↩

11. Ad-free search engine, offers limited personal accounts. Subscription account is $10/mo, similar model to Neeva. Allows one to raise/lower/pin/block specific sites. ↩

12. Techcrunch has a nice writeup on Andi. ↩

13. Originally launched in 1996 by Wired Magazine using Inktomi technology and was acquired by Lycos. Unfortunately, it was allowed to stagnate. It has since been relaunched though using new technology but it is unclear what connection, if any, the search engine maintains with it's original founders. ↩

14. Also owns Searchalot. The owning company is Advanced Search Technologies which has been in operation since 1999. It appears they have their own search engine and the result quality is decent. ↩

15. 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). ↩

16. It appears to have stagnated to a large extent. ↩

17. With similar goals to Wiby, Marginalia surfaces the indie web. The source code is available under the GNU Affero GPL v3 or later. ↩

18. "The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet." It's source code is available on GitHub under a GPLv2 license. ↩

19. Interestingly the search results are returned from Becovi which (among other things) does SEM. ↩

20. 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. ↩

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

22. Open source, free, non-profit. ↩

23. Whaleslide is lowly trafficked according to SimilarWeb 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. ↩

24. This search engine uses Common Crawl data and the source code of the engine is available on GitHub. ↩

25. Formerly sayhello. ↩