Search engines have become indispensable tools in our daily lives. With the rise of smartphones, it’s hard to imagine obtaining information about a place, route, or scientific question without them. But are you familiar with all the players in the Internet search market? Do they all offer the same value? We’ve compiled a list of the top 10 search engines available in France and worldwide:
- Bing
- Brave
- Yandex
- Baidu
- Yahoo
- Qwant
- Duckduckgo
- Ecosia
- Lilo
These search engines are categorized into two groups:
- Those using their own algorithms and indexes
- Meta-search engines that rely on the algorithms of other search engines
Read more: Who are the best in their field?
Search Engines with Their Own Algorithms
Google: The King of Search
It’s hard to discuss search engines without immediately thinking of Google, the most renowned among them, launched by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 2021, Google processed 80,000 queries per second, totaling 6.9 billion daily. It dominates the search market in France (92% market share) and globally (91%). Google’s dominance stems from its continuous innovation. Since 1998, the American company has developed a myriad of digital services around its search engine, including:
- Gmail
- Google Chrome
- Google Maps
- Google Drive
- YouTube (acquired in 2006)
- Android (acquired in 2005)
- Google Ads
- Google Cloud
Find out more: Search engines: what are the alternatives to Google?
Bing: Microsoft’s Attempt to Counter Google
Owned by tech giant Microsoft, Bing has struggled for years to offer a serious alternative to Google. Visually, it’s challenging to distinguish between the two, as Bing mirrors Google’s interface. Despite recent improvements, such as enhancing its algorithm and webmaster tool (Bing Webmaster Tools), Microsoft has difficulty providing more relevant results and convincing users worldwide to adopt its services. Bing’s modest market share is largely due to its default installation on Windows PCs. SEO experts note that many Bing users are professionals using the default search engine on their work computers.
Brave: The Web 3.0 Search Engine
Perhaps a lesser-known name on this list is Brave. Created in 2016 by a former Mozilla employee, Brave champions Web 3.0 internet searches. As both a browser and an independent search engine, Brave is open-source software aiming to protect user privacy by blocking trackers and allowing the use of the Tor network. Another unique feature of Brave is its native token, BAT (Basic Attention Token). Each search conducted via Brave rewards users with BAT, which they can keep or send to their favorite online content creators as compensation. In December 2021, Brave announced 50.2 million monthly active users—a modest number compared to industry giants but impressive for a search engine just six years old.
Yandex: Russia’s Leading Search Engine
Yandex Search Engine
Launched in 1997, Yandex, the Russian search engine, became profitable in 2002. Today, it leads the Russian market with a 62% share. With a completely independent index, Yandex has successfully developed a suite of services similar to Google’s, including maps, email, and cloud storage. Its dominance in Russia is attributed to its deep understanding of the Russian language and culture, allowing it to provide highly relevant search results for its users.
Find out more: Google versus Yandex, the clash of the titans
Baidu: The Chinese Giant
Baidu is to China what Yandex is to Russia. The leading search engine among the Chinese, Baidu is one of the most popular sites in the world ( source : similarweb ). Like its Russian counterpart, Baidu is criticized for its proximity to the Chinese government, as it applies the political censorship rules ordered by the latter. Baidu has signed several partnerships with Bing and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Meta-engines based on the algorithms of other engines
Remember: a meta-search engine is not an independent search engine. It uses the results provided by other search engines on the market.
Yahoo: The Veteran
Once the market leader in online search and a truly independent search engine, Yahoo is no longer the benchmark directory it was in the mid-90s. Its system of classifying websites alphabetically was supplanted by Google’s PageRank system in the late 90s. Owned by the Verizon group until 2021, Yahoo is now owned by the Apollo investment fund. Yahoo is no longer a search engine in its own right, and relies on Bing’s technology: a search performed using Yahoo’s search engine will actually call up Bing’s index to provide you with a result.
Qwant: The French Alternative
A French search engine created in 2013, Qwant is committed to data protection and guarantees the privacy of its users by ensuring that it does not track them or sell their personal data. Although Qwant does serve ads, these are not targeted, as no cookies are used to establish specific targeting. The French search engine has found itself in the spotlight on several occasions, notably because of its communications concerning the independence of its index and the sale of user data. While the engine claimed to use its own index and not to sell data to third parties, it was revealed that Qwant relied more than 60% on Bing’s index and sold a large proportion of its data to the American engine.
DuckDuckGo: Privacy-Focused Search
Like Qwant (which was actually inspired by DuckDuckGo), this engine offers its users (and their data) much greater web privacy than other engines on the market. DuckDuckGo has its own index to respond to user queries, but it can’t cover all requests on its own, and often relies on Bing, Yahoo or Yelp to provide answers.
Ecosia: The Eco-Friendly Search Engine
A German search engine, Ecosia ‘s particularity lies in its bias: the more searches performed on the engine, the more trees the company behind the engine will plant. However, like the search engines mentioned above, Ecosia does not have its own index, and relies on Bing to provide answers to queries that are modified by Ecosia’s own algorithms before being offered to users.
Lilo: The Solidarity Search Engine
A young French start-up available to the general public since 2015, Lilo aims to be a solidarity-based search engine. Half of the sales generated by the search engine (thanks to advertising) are used to fund social and solidarity projects, divided mainly into 3 themes: animal protection, environmental protection and help for the underprivileged. Mainly based on Bing’s technology to provide its answers, the Lilo engine sometimes solicits Google’s results to enrich its index.