There is perhaps no market more dominated by large entities than the search engine market. Google reigns supreme, with Bing and Yahoo! following behind. There are other competitors, such as Ask, but these three titans are by far the most popular and widely used. However, there are a number of alternative search engines which are growing in popularity.
Some search engines are particular popular in their country of origin. For example, Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia, and has numerous unique features that make it stand out from other search engines, such as islands, blocks of content that users can interact with without having to go to third party sites. This could essentially allow people to send details and book appointments with certain vendors without needing to actually visit the page, making the entire process a lot quicker and smoother. There is also Baidu, China’s own most popular search engine, providing information alongside links such as songs and videos.
Blippex indexes sites according to DwellRank, how long people have actually stayed on the site. This means that a site that is naturally more popular is higher in the rankings. This information is received by an extension that visitors can voluntarily install. Wolfram Alpha gathers facts and information from primary sources and presents the results in a range of tables and graphs, providing a much more unique means of displaying information than simple links.
For those with environmental concerns, Ecosia may be a search engine to trust. It donates 80% of its income to ecological programs, such as planting trees in Africa and supporting forest projects in Brazil, every time someone uses their search engine. It’s currently donating up to $75,000 a month, and is helping to plant four new trees a minute.
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that finances free and open source software, and that also refuses to track a user’s search history. Offering customisation as well as a range of original features, it’s becoming a popular alternative to other search engines, and it topped ten million searches a day last month for the first time. As more and more alternatives spring up, many companies will be taking them into account in their search engine optimisation campaigns alongside the giants like Google and Bing. We look forward with interest to seeing how these alternative search engines develop in the future.