Search Engines used a web directory for people. They could reach websites useful to them until bigger players such as Yahoo! came in. It was no longer a web directory, Google’s desire to bring the best search results changed the whole game. Even Yahoo could not compete and was later sold to Verizon for merely $4.5 billion in 2017. Microsoft Corp. offered to buy Yahoo Inc for $44.6 billion several years ago.
Let’s discuss 5 less known search engines which are equally as good as Google.
DuckDuckGo – Private Search Engine
DuckDuckGo is a US based search engine and it started merely because they wanted users to give another alternate option. The company believes in full privacy to the users unlike Google who is always watching its users.
DuckDuckGO recently crossed 3 billion monthly searches with about 5 mil. downloads per month, making it one of the successful venture stories. DDG is actually faster than rest of the search engines since it doesn’t allow social media to track your search history.
Baidu – Chinese Search Engine
Google and other US based internet products are banned/not allowed in China. Hence, it’s always a great opportunity for Chinese companies to expand their companies domestically.
Baidu is similar to Google. They even have the mission to make self driving cars possible in China. It was founded in the year 2000 and today, it has an overall market share of approximately 70% in China with a whooping 3.3 billion searches everyday.
Yandex – Russian Search Engine
Yandex was launched in 1997 and it’s the shorter version of Yet Another Index. Yandex is a Russian based search engine launched by two Russian developers back in the late 90s.
It had an IPO in the year 2011 and had earned $1.3 billion on the first day itself as public offering, which was the 2nd largest IPO after Google at that time. It captures more than 60% of the market in Russia.
Naver
Naver is South Korean based search engine which was launched in the year 1999. Currently it is owned by the Naver Corporation and has a market size of more than 75% in South Korea. Naver is rightfully called the ‘Google of South Korea’.
Currently it has a user base of more than 40 million and has daily visits 28 million. They have a diversified line of products such as mail, encyclopaedia, TV and also has Naver Junior for children.
Ecosia
Ecosia is search engine based in Berlin, Germany. It is one of the unique search engines that donates more than 80% of its profits to NGOs/NPOs. The consider themselves as a social business. They also plant a tree after a certain number of searches.
Ecosia is also planning to create debit cards made out of cherrywood trees and not from plastic since they take a lot of time to decompose. The best part about Ecosia is that in spite of all the businesses they are doing, they are a carbon negative company.