List of search engines

Last updated

Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases.

Contents

By content/topic

General

NameLanguageBackend ownership
Ask.com MultilingualGoogle Flag of the United States.svg
Baidu Chinese Baidu Flag of the People's Republic of China.svg
Brave Search MultilingualBrave Flag of the United States.svg
Dogpile English Metasearch engine
DuckDuckGo MultilingualMultiple
Ecosia MultilingualGoogle and Microsoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Elasticsearch MultilingualElasticsearch
Exalead MultilingualCloudview Flag of France.svg
Excite†MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Gigablast English Apache License 2.0
Google MultilingualGoogle Flag of the United States.svg
HotBot EnglishMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Kagi English Metasearch engine and Kagi Flag of the United States.svg
Lycos MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
MetaCrawler English Metasearch engine
Microsoft Bing MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Mojeek MultilingualMojeek Flag of the United Kingdom.svg
Opensearch Multilingual Apache License 2.0 (Elasticsearch fork)
Petal MultilingualHuawei Flag of the People's Republic of China.svg
Presearch Multilingual Metasearch engine
Qwant MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
SearXNG Multilingual Metasearch engine
Sogou MultilingualTencent Flag of the People's Republic of China.svg
Startpage EnglishGoogle Flag of the United States.svg
Swisscows MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
WebCrawler EnglishMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
YaCy MultilingualGNU GPL-2.0-or-later
Yahoo! Search†MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Yandex MultilingualYandex Flag of Russia.svg
Youdao† Chinese NetEase Flag of the People's Republic of China.svg
You.com EnglishMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg


† Main website is a portal
Open source

Geographically localized

NameLanguageCountry
Accoona Chinese, English China, United States
BIGLOBE Japanese Japan
Daum Korean Korea
Nate Korean Korea
Egerin Kurdish Sweden [1] [2] [3]
Fireball German, English Germany
Goo Japanese Japan
Leit.is Icelandic, English Iceland
Najdi.si Slovenian Slovenia
Naver Korean Korea
Parsijoo Persian Iran
Pipilika (defunct) Bengali, English Bangladesh
Rambler Russian Russia
Rediff India
SAPO Portuguese Portugal
Search.ch Switzerland
Sesam (defunct) Norway, Sweden
Seznam Czech Czech Republic
Walla! Israel
Yahoo Japan Japanese Japan (Google backend)
Yongzin Tibetan China
ZipLocal English Canada, United States

Accountancy

Business

Computers

Content

Dark web

Education

General:

Academic materials only:

Enterprise

Events

Food and recipes

Genealogy

Job

Medical

Mobile/handheld

News

People

Real estate/property

Television

Travel

Video

Video games

By data type

Search engines dedicated to a specific kind of information

Datasets

Maps

Multimedia

Price

Source code

BitTorrent

These search engines work across the BitTorrent protocol.

Blog

By model

Search appliances

Desktop search engines

Desktop search engines listed on a light purple background are no longer in active development.

NamePlatformRemarksLicense
HP Autonomy Windows IDOL Enterprise Desktop Search, HP Autonomy Universal Search. [5] Proprietary, commercial
Beagle Linux Open-source desktop search tool for Linux based on Lucene. Unmaintained since 2009.A mix of the X11/MIT License and the Apache License
Copernic Desktop Search Windows Major desktop search program. The full trial version downgrades after the trial period automatically to the free version, which is (anno 2018) limited to indexing a maximum of 10.000 files. Proprietary (30 day trial)
DocFetcher Cross-platformOpen-source desktop search tool for Windows and Linux, based on Apache Lucene Eclipse Public License
dtSearch Desktop Windows Proprietary (30 day trial)
Everything Windows Find files and folders by name instantly on NTFS volumesFreeware
Found MacOS Searches for files stored locally, and the cloud and inbox and, is summoned with a double-tap of the ctrl key. Program now discontinued.Free, Proprietary
GNOME Storage Linux Open-source desktop search tool for Unix/LinuxGPL
Google Desktop Linux, Mac OS X, Windows Integrates with the main Google search engine page. As of September 14, 2011, Google has discontinued this product.Freeware
ISYS Search Software Windows ISYS:Desktop search software.Proprietary (14-day trial)
KRunner Linux
Locate32 Windows Graphical port of Unix's locate & updatedb BSD License [6]
Lookeen Windows Desktop search product with Outlook plugin and limited support for other formats via IFilters, uses Lucene search engine.Proprietary (14-day trial) [7]
Nepomuk Linux Open-source semantic desktop search tool for Linux. Has been replaced by Baloo in KDE Applications from release 4.13 onward.License SA 3.0 and the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2
Recoll Linux, Unix, Windows, macOS Open-source desktop search tool for Unix/LinuxGPL [8]
Spotlight macOS Found in Apple Mac OS X "Tiger" and later OS X releases.Proprietary
Strigi Linux, Unix, Solaris, Mac OS X and Windows Cross-platform open-source desktop search engine. Unmaintained since 2011-06-02 [9] .LGPL v2 [10]
Terrier Search Engine Linux, Mac OS X, Unix Desktop search for Windows, Mac OS X (Tiger), Unix/Linux. MPL v1.1 [11]
Tracker Linux, Unix Open-source desktop search tool for Unix/LinuxGPL v2 [12]
Tropes Zoom Windows Semantic Search Engine (no longer available) [13] Freeware and commercial
Unity Dash Linux Part of Ubuntu Desktop GPL v3, [14] LGPL v2.1 [15]
Windows Search Windows Part of Windows Vista and later OSs. Available as Windows Desktop Search for Windows XP and Server 2003. Does not support indexing UNC paths on x64 systems.Proprietary
X1 Desktop Search Windows Major desktop search product along with Copernic Desktop Search Proprietary (14-day trial) [16]
WumpusCross platformDesktop search focused on information retrieval researchGPL


Child-safe search engines

Metasearch engines

NameLanguage
Dogpile English
Excite English
Info.com English
Kayak.com Multilingual
Mamma.com
MetaCrawler English
MetaGer Multilingual
Mobissimo Multilingual
Otalo.com English
Publisher's clearinghouse Search and Win
Searx Multilingual
SearXNG Multilingual
Skyscanner Multilingual
Wego.com Multilingual
All In One English

Natural language

Open-source search engines

Web search engine


P2P search engines

NameLanguage
Seeks (open-source) English
YaCy (free and fully decentralized)Multilingual

Privacy search engines

Social and environmental focus

Semantic browsing engines

NameDescriptionSpeciality
Evi Specialises in knowledge base and semantic searchanswer engine
Swoogle Searching over 10,000 ontologiesSemantic web documents
Yebol defunct
Yummly Semantic web search for food, cooking, and recipesfood related

Social search engines

Usenet

Visual search engines

By popularity

Defunct or acquired search engines

NameBackend ownershipDemise
iWon Ask.com Shut down after AT&T merger[ citation needed ]
Teoma Ask.com Merged to Ask.com which still uses its algorithms
A9.com Microsoft Bing Redirect to Amazon homepage (parent company)
AOL Google until 2015, then Microsoft Bing Merged to Yahoo!
Alexa Internet Microsoft Bing Bought by Amazon in 1999, shut down in 2021
Ciao! Microsoft Bing Shut down in 2018
Ms. Dewey Microsoft Bing January 2009
Groovle Google Taken over by Google after Google sued for name similarity
MySpace Search Google Function taken over by Google in 2006
Mystery Seeker Google Novelty "search"; went offline in 2017
Netscape Google Now redirects to AOL
Ripple Google as of 2017 at the latest
Ecocho Google, then Yahoo!
Forestle Google, then Yahoo! Redirected to Ecosia in 2011
Yippy IBM Watson Re-branded in 2023 as Togoda.com [17] [18]
Grams Grams (anonymous owner)Closed in 2017

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Kurdish Swede creates first Kurdish search engine". Bas News. Archived from the original on 2014-01-02. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  2. ↑ "First Kurdish Search Engine, Egerin, Is Launched". SBWire. 30 December 2013. Retrieved 1 January 2014.
  3. ↑ "This Entrepreneur Wants to Build a Kurdish Alternative to Google". Vice.com. 18 March 2016.
  4. ↑ Sullivan, Danny (April 18, 2007). "Goodbye Froogle, Hello Google Product Search!". Search Engine Land. Retrieved 3 June 2018.
  5. ↑ "HP Universal Search". Archived from the original on 2015-05-16. Retrieved 2014-07-01.
  6. ↑ "Download Locate32 3.1.11.7100". softpedia. 20 August 2012.
  7. ↑ "Lookeen 10". Lookeen. Retrieved 2016-02-03.
  8. ↑ According to Recoll
  9. ↑ See "Strigi's Release Files" . Retrieved 2024-01-18.
  10. ↑ According to COPYING inside version 0.5.10 tar.bz2 package.
  11. ↑ "Terrier License". GitHub. 13 November 2021.
  12. ↑ According to COPYING Archived 2012-07-14 at archive.today in SVN trunk.
  13. ↑ "Retrieved 15 August 2015". Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 16 August 2015.
  14. ↑ "Unity on GitHub". GitHub. 19 November 2021.
  15. ↑ "Required License Files". GitHub. 19 November 2021.
  16. ↑ "X1 Search 8". X1 Technologies. Retrieved 12 July 2014.
  17. ↑ "At Togoda, we are revolutionizing the search experience through advanced thematic AI exploration. | Togoda AI Search Engine". www.linkedin.com. Retrieved 2025-07-22.
  18. ↑ "Togoda Search Engine - The Educated Choice for Search". Togoda. Retrieved 2025-07-22.
  19. ↑ "Data, Data, Everywhere Data. Now a Better Way to Understand It". 27 March 2015.
  20. ↑ "Il dominio Volunia.it è in vendita". MRW.it News. 11 April 2014.
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