Search Engines

Chances are, you use Google. It accounts for around 90% of searches. Which is probably because it is so good.

The next ranking search engine is Bing, which Microsoft installs as the default on Windows and gamely hopes you’ll stick with it. It records a market share of under 4%. Which gives you the answer to that. The remainder of the tail, after Google and Bing are:

Yahoo
Baidu
Yandex
DuckDuckGo
Ask.com
Ecosia
Aol.com
Internet Archive

By the time you get to the likes of AOL (!) the market share is around 0.05%, all but irrelevant. I have tried Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia before, but found them wanting. Recently, I decided to try to reduce tracking/fingerprinting a little more and see if I could finally jettison Google search.

I have been very surprised with DuckDuckGo. I don’t like the name. I don’t like the logo. But the search results (and it does the AI summary thing, like Google) now seem excellent.

If you haven’t tried one of these alternatives in a while, and think that Google just needs some competition to stop "accidentally" finding new ways to exploit your data, might be worth a revisit.