29 Alternative Search Engines to Shatter Your Dependence On Google

When it comes to online search, a couple of websites immediately come to mind. Of course there's Google, the number one search engine. It had around 63.9% of the market for search in 2017. Yahoo , and Bing make up another 10% - 15% of the search market. That leaves around 25% +/- of the search market open.

Many of us are familiar with the big three, but the fact is there are dozens of alternative search engines on the web.These alternative search engines are a valuable resource for bloggers, marketers and businesses.

The fact is, alternative search engines generate millions of searches queries every day and as a website owner, marketer or user, they offer you an alternative source for finding valuable information on the web.

The following is a list of 30 advanced and alternative search engines that can help you find almost anything, or anyone on the Internet. They're a great source for following news about your industry, monitoring your online reputation, and promoting your content.

General Search

Google, Yahoo and Bing are general search engines. They can find whatever information you're looking for across the web. There are many other general search alternatives out there. Here are a few worth checking out.

1. Ask.com

Formerly “Ask Jeeves” this site is still around and still the first choice for many U.S. users. It accounts for about a 3% market share. This search engine offers a “Famous Q&A” list of results found on the right hand side that can be pretty handy.

2. DuckDuckGo

This engine is truly loved by its users and is especially popular in China. Along with its neat, clean interface, DuckDuckGo respects user privacy. It never tracks your activities, blocks advertising trackers and keeps your personal data, personal.

3. Dogpile

Back in the early days, Dogpile was the number one choice for fast and effective searching on the web. However, all that changed in the late 1990's and Dogpile faded into obscurity when Google rose to become number one.

Today, Dogpile is back and offers a growing index and a clean user interface. If you're looking for an alternative to Google that offers an attractive interface and useful crosslink results, check out Dogpile.

4. Giburu

Unlike most search engines, Giburu doesn't censor your search results. It offers a Firefox toolbar plugin that allows anonymous search with 128 bit encryption making your search queries completely safe.

If you're looking for uncensored and unpersonalized anonymous web and news results, try Giburu!

5. Search Encrypt

Another privacy based search engine. Search Encrypt is a great alternative to DuckDuckGo and Giburu. It includes a general search function along with video and image search capabilities.

6. Ecosia

If you want to help save the environment while you search, Ecosia is a great engine to use. Just run your normal searches and Ecosia will donate its surplus income to conservationist organizations that plant trees. Plus Ecosia provides great results using Bing and their own algorithm.

7. Yandex

This search engine was developed in Russia and is the Russian Google 55-65% of the market for search.It's also very popular in areas of the E.U. Like Google, it offers many similar services like mobile apps, analytics, cloud storage and email service. If you're looking for a European alternative to Google, try Yandex.

8. Internet Archive

Internet Archive is the web's version of the “Wayback Machine.” It allows you to search the history of over 284 billion web pages. It's been taking snapshots of the web for years.

Great if you're searching for news or web page design from the late 90's til today. It might not be an every day search engine, but if you need archival material, start here.

9. Giga Blast

Giga Blast indexes billions of web pages and provides the latest information, quickly. It's only for searching web pages, but offers filters for enhanced search results.

Social Media Search Engines

These alternative search engines allow you to search one or more social platforms in one place. They're excellent for gaining insight and additional data about the results.

10. Keyhole

Search hashtags, keywords, @mentions, and URL with Keyhole. This is a great site to check blog post shares. Select URL, put in the posts URL and you'll see who shared it.

11. Social Mentions

Social Mentions is a search engine that allows you to search across multiple types of networks. These include blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, events, images, news, comments and more. A great site to search for social mentions and gain understanding about social trends.

12. Buzzsumo

If you have a particular topic in mind and want to see which articles were most shared for that topic, try Buzzsumo. They also offer a paid version that can give you access to additional tools for each topic.

13. Boardreader

If you're seeking industry specific forums to engage with, Boardreader specifically searches online forums. Use Boardreader to search online forums and marrow results by date and language.

Image Specific Search Engines

Image search can be tricky. If you need to find specific images and icons, these alternative search engines focus on finding free and premium images and icons across the web.

14. Iconfinder

Iconfinder is a repository of over 2.5 million images and icons. It's also a search engine specifically to find free and premium icons.

15. Image Search

Powered by Google's AJAX Search API, Image Search has all the goodies that are available in Google Images. Search for photos on Facebook, Flickr, US Government sites, Corbis, Photobucket, MySpace, deviantart, Webshots, Typehead, Wordpress and Blogger.

16. TinEye

TinEye is unique in that it's a reverse image search engine. It allows users to search for images by using images.

Knowledge Based Search Engines

Knowledge engines allow you to ask specific questions and receive the answer along with relevant websites.

17. eHow

eHow is one of the oldesrt Q&A search engines on the qweb. It allows users to search about almost any topic from home décor or food, to finance or legal questions.

18. Answers

Answers is another Q&A site that help you find the answers to your questions. Simply ask and you'll receive accurate answers.

19. Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge and search engine that retrieves answers to factual questions, finds images, solves calculations and more.

Search For Documents, eBooks and Presentations

If you're looking for specific documents, presentations, ebooks or other similar types of files, try these alternative search engines.

20. Google Advanced Search

While it's still Google, advanced search allows you to search for specific types of documents. Looking for a .pdf? Set that as the criteria. It will search all types of documents including word docs and Powerpoint presentations.

21. Scribd

Scribd is the largest social reading site and publishing network that helps you discover original written content across the web. Results can be sorted by length, file type, language, upload date or cost.

22. SlideShare

SlideShare is the largest online presentation sharing community on the Internet. If you're seeking a specific webinar or conference, you'll most likely find it here.

Search Engines To Find People

While the advanced search function on most social media sites can help you find people who have accounts, these final two alternative search engines use data from both online and offline to help you find the people you're looking for.

23. Spokeo

Spokeo aggregates both online and offline data sources and lets you search by name, email, phone number, username or address.

24. Pipi

Pipi finds information about people that is not available on regular general search engines. You can search by name, username, phone number and email.

Regional Search Engines

Regional alternative search engines index websites for individual countries or regions of the world. These can be useful if you have a product that has international appeal, or if you're researching new markets. Here are a few that are worth checking out.

25. Baidu

Baidu is China's number one search engine. It allows search for websites, news, audio, video, maps and images. Other Chinese search engines include: Yam, Youdao and Sogou.

26. Naver

Naver is a search engine in South Korea. It's the first web portal to allow searching for websites, images, videos, news and more.

27. Goo

Goo is an internet search engine and web portal in Japan. It primarily crawls Japanese sites and offers searching for images, websites, blogs and maps.

28. Walla

Walla is based in Israel and provides news, search and email services. Search includes websites, photos, jobs, shopping products and more.

29. Das Oerliche

This is a German web portal and local directory that allows users to search for public locations, using phone numbers, names, or streets.

Whether you're searching for an answer, an image or an old friend, there's a search engine for that. These alternative search engines offer you additional inbound marketing opportunities you may not have thought about.

While Google, Yahoo and Bing are still number one, two and three, these alternative search engines still receive millions of inquiries every single day and are worth checking out. Happy hunting!