Which are the top 10 and the Most Popular Search Engines in the world? In our everyday life, we do a lot of work using search engines to find out what we need in the digital space. Be it research, education, tutorials, marketing, purchase, or anything else—-It has its presence in every nook and corner of the Internet. It will be not worth an exaggeration if we say that the Internet is dead without search engines. Each second Google performs nearly 70 thousand search queries and that amounts to about more than 5 billion a day.
The history of search engine algorithms dates back to 1990 and there emerged as the top search engines later on, although, in the beginning, they were limited to a few ones. With the threshold of industrial automation, cloud computing, and the widespread use of the Internet throughout the world wide web, we cannot ignore the use and essentiality of the major search engines frequently used around the world. With the advancement of technological development, these algorithmic web crawlers too are being developed to provide better results to the users taking into account a lot of factors as well as ranking signals. Now, let’s have a glance at the best search engines around the world.
Page of Contents:
I have listed below the Most Popular Search Engines in the world. The discussion also includes its features and market share.
Google is the most popular search engine in the world. When we talk about crawling, indexing, and searching algorithm, it stands first in the globe. This searching giant dominates more than 92% market share which is needless to say, as most of the end-users are well aware of it.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page started it as a research project back in 1996 and founded it in 1998. They even decided to sell the engine for a whopping $75000 to Excite but the offer was rejected. Larry Page, the CEO and co-founder of Google, once said, ”We plan to aggressively grow the company and the technology so we can continue to provide the best search experience on the web”. This is now true because, among all the search engines, it developed the most effective search algorithm taking into account millions of factors. As for example, when the tech giant developed PageRank, it took into account ‘500 million variables and two billion terms.
Google is the best search engine in the market offering a lot of features like rich featured snippets in the search result pages(SERPs), best organic traffic, and advanced and sophisticated search algorithm to result in the best output based inquiry provided by end-users. Also, it provides Google Drive, Gmail, searching Lens, Voiced-based search, Search Console, Analytics, Adsense, Tag Manager, and a lot of popular apps.
Bing
Bing is another popular search engine launched back in 2009. The searching is not as sophisticated as Google is in AI and searching algorithms, however, in a short period of time they tried to do their best. The Microsoft team developed Bing as an alternative to Google and rebranded it as Microsoft Bing in October 2020. In Microsoft web browser and Windows, PC Bing is the default search engine. Before turning into a full-fledged and powerful search engine Bing had its origin in MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search.
In July 2009, Yahoo and Bing signed a partnership agreement in which Microsoft Bing announced to power Yahoo to conduct searches. Like Google, it also filters search results into various tabs like images, maps, news, videos, etc.
According to Statista, Bing handles a quarter of all search queries in the United states and that is indeed a great endeavor for Microsoft. Also, it started a rewards program to increase its market share in the search results in the United States.
According to Statcounter, Bing’s search engine has 2.48% market share in the global market. In certain areas like GUI, it is better than others. According to Alexa, it is the #28 most visited site in the world. So, when we talk about the most popular search engines, Microsoft Bing is next to Google.
Yahoo
In the list of the world’s most popular search engines, Yahoo is a great name that occupies about 1.5% market share. David Filo and Jerry Yang founded the company in 1994. From 2011 to 2015, Yahoo search results were powered by Bing and Google too powered its search-related activities from 2015 to 2018.
It is also one of the best email providers in the global market. In 2014 in the United States, Yahoo was the default search engine in the Firefox web browser. There is much similarity in search results between Bing and Yahoo, as the former powers the latter. The company has several apps for end-users.
Baidu
Baidu is the most used search engine in China and it was launched in 2000 by the Chinese entrepreneur Erich Zu. They are trying to make it better in AI, Searching algorithms, and other core ways similar to Google. On the mainland, Baidu powers 3.3 billion searches every day and occupies about 76.91% market share while Google contributes 2.41% and Microsoft Bing leads 3.65%. Outside the country, it has very little influence. It dominates only the Chinese market and you need to understand its language, culture, and customer relationship if you want to succeed in its marketing strategy. However, it is not as popular as Google which dominates the world. Baidu has built a simpler organic searching algorithm than Google’s. In the world of the Internet, China set up strong web firewall and regulations to have a monopoly in the market. In the global space, it occupies 1.39% market share.
Yandex
Yandex is not only the most popular search engine in Russia but also is most used. Launched back in 1997 to provide searches to users in Russia but it has too much popularity and presence in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, and Turkey. The term Yandex stands for ‘Yet Another iNDEXER’. The root domain Yandex.ru was created and registered in 1997 when two Russian developers attempted to aid patent classification under the company Arkadia in 1990.
This search engine owns more than 43% market share in Russia from Aug 2020 to Aug 2021. The searching algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google’s. The paid searches too are less expensive than Google. The company provides several types of services such as Yandex map, Yandex finance, online translator, and Music. In the international market, it has a share of 1.21%.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a search engine with a 0.63% global market share. The search engine uses several databases to provide the best search results to the end-users based on queries. It is apt to protect users’ privacy. You no need to worry about your sensitive data and personal information. Since it takes too much care to protect use’s privacy, it is very often called a private browser.
The search engine has browser extensions too for android, iOS, and desktop users. It is the default search engine in Firefox, Safari, and Brave. You can download DuckDuckGo both from the App Store and Google Play. The search engine uses more than 100 lists of sites (like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Wikipedia, StackOverflow, etc) to show the best results to the users.
Ask.Com
Ask.com is a search engine founded in 1995 and previously it was known as Ask Jeeves. The web engine has question+answer formats in its searching algorithm. To provide the best answers based on the user’s query, it uses archived data. Owing to dependency on archived data, the search results are not as current as provided by Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Naver
Naver was created in 1999 and started to work as a popular search engine in South Korea in 2000. The Naver Corporation built this engine with comprehensive features to provide the best output to the users. It can present all relevant search results on a single page.
In South Korea, Naver is the dominant search engine with a 75% market share. It has 42 million users. Owing to its popularity and dominance in the market, it is called the Google of South Korea.
Naver’s main search engine and its research search site hold the largest market share (75%) in South Korea and their traffic is even higher than Google and Google Scholar in the country
scholarlycommunications.jiscinvolve.org
Naver is not only the most popular search engine in South Korea but also a service provider in various fields. The other services it provides are Naver TV, Naver Blog, Naver Encyclopeadia, Naver Mail, Webtoon etc.
AOL
AOL is one of the top search engines that started as Control Video Corporation in New York in 1983. It was renamed America Online in 1991 and AOL.Inc in 2009. Verizon Communications acquired AOL for $4.4 billion on June 23, 2015.
The company also provides other services like AOL Advertising, AOL Mail, and AOL Platform.
Internet Archive
Archive.org is an Internet Archive search engine that is useful to trace back and find out how a site looks a decade ago if it was then in existence. This search engine crawls 612 billion web pages across the world wide web.
In the Internet Archive, you get almost all kinds of resources—-Art, Music, Audio, Video, Site, Software, Websites, etc. You can access the resources free of charge. The company was founded in 1996. So, you can trace back the old sites since 1996 through the Wayback Machine.
The search engine has:
- 28 million books
- 14 million audio records
- 3.5 million images
- 6 million videos and
- 580,000 software applications
Other Search Engines
So far, you have understood that the most popular search engines in the world are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Ask.com, Naver, AOL, and the Internet Archive(Archive.org). Among these search engines, Google is the #1 in the global market with 92% market share and the second largest and the best search engine is Microsoft Bing.
Besides, Google there are other search engines too like YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, Ecosia, and Wolfram. YouTube is the second most visited search engine popular for free video hosting. Facebook uses both text and lives video. It is too popular and engaging social media platform. Amazon is a cloud service and Ecommerce provider site with the global market.
| Most Popular Search Engines | Rank | Market Share(Global) |
| #1 | 92% | |
| Bing | #2 | 2.48% |
| Yahoo | #3 | 1.5% |
| Baidu | #4 | 1.39% |
| Yandex | #5 | 1.21% |
| DuckDuckGo | #6 | 0.63% |
Google dominates the world and is credited to be the top best search engine in the market. However, Baidu is the most used search engine in China and Naver is the most popular in South Korea and that’s why it is called the Google of South Korea.
Yandex is most popular in Russia and recorded to be the top search engine there. Nowadays, Bing and DuckDuckGo are increasing their searches more and more every day. Yahoo makes a deal with Microsoft Bing to power its searching algorithm to provide the best results to the end-users. Microsoft even started a rewards program to increase its popularity and use in the United States, yet Google dominates the world market and it outranks others in its highly developed searching algorithm. Google changes and updates its algorithm several thousand times a year. While you take into consideration the pros and cons, you can definitely evaluate that each search engine has its own merits and demerits, however, in all respect, Google is the top best search engine in the world.
Other Resources Related to Search Engines
You can read the following article on search engine optimization which contains relevant information on it. To grow your website, you need to use WordPress SEO properly. So, read the article.
){kind=link}