Top 12 Best Search Engines in The World (2024)

Search Engines are now part of our daily life, whether it be carrying out research for Xmas presents or where is the nearest coffee shop open before 7am or looking for best Steak House in town. People are now becoming more and more dependent on search engines to get the answer for their everyday queries.

At Inspire we monitor our search traffic using a variety of analytics. Most of our queries returned are related to what we do and some are simply bizarre. Those we’re interested in relate to the services of what we do e.g improving search ranking, web design, web development, e-Commerce management and many more.

Much as we utilise “all routes to market” we are still heavily dependent on the search engines for our bread & butter traffic.

Recently we did a piece of work for a client looking to reach into the Russian market, they’d spoken to other firms who all shared about what they’d do on Google and how such experts they are. This completely missed the point as Google are not the dominant search engine in Russia, Yandex is!!!

This brought it home to me that perhaps people have assumed that because Google is a dominant Global player that they are also the dominant player in every market.

For that reason we thought it would be worthwhile having a run down on the rest of the World, so let’s look at top 12search engines in the world.

1. Google
Google Search Engine is the best search engine in the world and it is also one of most popular products from Google. Almost 70 percent of the Search Engine market has been acquired by Google. The tech giant is always evolving and looking to improve the search engine algorithm to provide best results to the end-user. Although Google appears to be the biggest search engine, as of 2015 YouTube is now more popular than Google (on desktop computers).
GIVE ITA GO:Google Search App

2. Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s answer to Google and it was launched in 2009. Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft’s web browser. At Bing, they are always striving to make it a better search engine but it’s got a long way to go to give Google competition. Microsoft’s search engine provides different services including image, web and video search along with maps. Bing introduced Places (Google’s equivalent is Google My Business), this is a great platform for business to submit their details to optimise their search results.
GIVE ITA GO:Bing Search App

3. Yahoo
Yahoo & Bing compete more with each other than with Google. A recent report on netmarketshare.com tells us that Yahoo have a market share of 7.68 percent. Although a leader as a free email provider, this is declining significantly though with their recent acknowledgement that User Details & Passwords where hacked last year.
GIVE IT A GO:Yahoo Search App

4. Baidu
Baidu is the most used search engine in China and was founded in Jan, 2000 by Chinese Entrepreneur, Eric Xu. This web search is made to deliver results for website, audio files and images. It provides some other services including maps, news, cloud storage and much more.
WATCH THEIR STORY:Baidu: The Chinese Google

5. AOL
Aol.com is also among the top search engines. These are the guys that used to send out CD’s which you’d load onto your PC to install their browser and modem software. Once the pre-eminent player they now have a market share of 0.59 percent. Verizon Communication bought AOL for $4.4 billion. It was started back in 1983 as Control Video Corporation. It was named America Online in 1991 and in 2009 as AOL Inc. AOL is a global mass media company which is based in New York. The company also provides advertising services as AOL Advertising, AOL mail and AOL Platform.

6. Ask.com
Founded in 1995, Ask.com, previously known as Ask Jeeves. Their key concept was to have search results based on a simple question + answer web format. It is a question & answer community where you can get the answers for your question and it integrates a large amount of archive data to answer your question. Because of this dependency on archived and active user contributions the results will not be as current as those you get in Google, Bing and Yahoo. They’ve tried to counter where their resources don’t have the answer they take help from a third-party search engine. Interestingly they don’t name who this is.

Excite is not widely known but is one that still gets into the top 10. Excite is an online service portal that provides internet services like email, search engine, news, instant messaging and weather updates. This also provides us with the latest trends, topics and search for phrases such as: What can President Trump actually do?

11. Lycos
Lycos has a good reputation in search engine industry. Its key areas served are email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites.

12. Chacha.com- December 2016 UPDATE: ChaCha ceased trading due to declining advertising revenues
Chacha.com is a human-guided search engine and was founded in 2006. You can ask anything in its search box and you will be answered in real-time. It also provides mobile search and marketing services. You can also install its mobile apps on iPhone, iPad and Android.

The key question though which is the right fit for your business given the location, device being used and type of target audience you want to reach?
During the collation of this list, we’ve taken data from Wikipedia, Netmarketshare.com and Alexa.com.

At Inspire, we are always looking for the latest trends and the future of SEO. If you are interested in improving your own ranking with a Search Engine Optimisation Campaign, then contact the Inspire team on 01738 700006 or submit your details below.