To be frank, Google cannot be replaced by any other search engine. But, we can find the best Google alternatives in terms of privacy and some other factors. As we all know that Google offers personalized search results by sharing some of our private data to Google. Some times, this personalization becomes annoying when you see repeated and targetted ads where-ever you visit on the internet.
Why do we need Alternatives to Google?
It is the fact that Google knows all about us. The major reason is being an ad company as its core, Google collects users data continuously. After all, the Google business model is data collection and advertisements. Google collects more data means, better-targeted ads and more revenue to the company. Check out Google’s last year’s (2019) stand-alone ad revenue increased to $134 billion according to statista.com.
Besides, there are many search engines that focus on user privacy which you may be interested in. Here is the list of Google Alternatives in 2020:
Top 5 Google Alternatives in 2020
- Bing
- Yahoo!
- DuckDuckGo
- Yandex
- Startpage
1. Bing
It is known that Bing is the second most popular Search Engine after Google. It is owned and maintained by Microsoft. Just like Google, Bing also provides various search services like Web search, Image search, Video and Map searches.
Bing’s homepage has ever-changing beautiful pictures of various things like animals, places, people, sports, etc., Unlike Google, Bing provides large-sized grid thumbnails for video searches. The thumbnails also provide video preview on the same page. It makes easier for us to get the more relevant video to our search.
2. Yahoo!
Yahoo! search is one of the oldest Seach Engine which is older than Google Search. Apart from serving as a search engine, Yahoo! also provides various services such as email, online shopping center, games, news, travel directory and much more.
Yahoo! search supports around 38 different languages around the world. Other than these features, Yahoo! also provides a better result for images search as Flickr has been integrated with the search engine. Also, there are a couple of sections available for Yahoo! Answers, and Yahoo! Finance which has much more information on several topics.
On the other side, Yahoo! search perform fair better than Google search on privacy concern.
3. DuckDuckGo
If your major concern is your online privacy, then DuckDuckGo is the right google alternative search engine for you. It has quickly gained popularity because of its user’s privacy is their first concern. DuckDuckGo doesn’t track any of our data which means, no targeted ads will follow us.
DuckDuckGo uses a clean interface and it gives you the search results from other search engines like Yahoo!, Yandex besides Google. There’s a DuckDuckGo extension available for Chrome and Mozilla to keep your online activities private.
There’s a cool feature available in DuckDuckGo called bang which doesn’t exist on other search engines. It allows users to search directly on other sites such as Amazon, Wikipedia, or Youtube, by starting their query with an exclamation mark! (e.g. !a, !w, !facebook)
4. Yandex
Yandex is a popular search engine in Russia and it also used in some parts of Europe. Also, it stands as the fifth largest search engine worldwide.
Yandex is one of the biggest competitors to Google as it also provides services like Google such as mobile apps, a web browser, maps, analytics, cloud storage, email services and much more. The search results were similar look like Google. Also, it allows us to search through images, videos, and news.
As Yandex is based on Russia, you might want to skip this, if privacy is your first concern.
5. Startpage
Previously, there was a search engine named Ixquick, which is a standalone search engine like Google that displays its own search results. Later they developed another search engine called Startpage which includes search results from Google but without the tracking.
In 2009, Ixquick and Startpage merged together and currently working under the Startpage brand.
Apart from search results, Startpage also provides proxy service to browse the websites anonymously.
Final Words: So which is the best Google Alternative search engine?
There is no doubt that Google performs better than all of the above-mentioned search engines. Because Google uses a powerful and intelligent algorithm along with AI to provide better and personalized search results.
Go ahead and check out the best Google alternatives and let us know in the comment section if we miss out on something and if there are some other alternate search engines.
Also read: Top 10 YouTube alternative to watch videos