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 MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Ecosia MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Elasticsearch Multilingual Apache 2.0 until 2021, then Elasticsearch
Exalead MultilingualCloudview Flag of France.svg
ExciteMultilingualMicrosoft 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 Inc 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
Qwant MultilingualMicrosoft Bing Flag of the United States.svg
Searx 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 Multilingual GPL-2.0-or-later
Yahoo! SearchMultilingualMicrosoft 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

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
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

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
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
Skyscanner Multilingual
Wego.com Multilingual

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 Redirected to DuckDuckGo in 2021
Grams Grams (anonymous owner)Closed in 2017

See also

Related Research Articles

robots.txt Internet protocol

robots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MSN</span> Collection of Internet sites

MSN is an American web portal and related collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and mobile devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, alongside the release of Windows 95.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Desktop search</span>

Desktop search tools search within a user's own computer files as opposed to searching the Internet. These tools are designed to find information on the user's PC, including web browser history, e-mail archives, text documents, sound files, images, and video. A variety of desktop search programs are now available; see this list for examples. Most desktop search programs are standalone applications. Desktop search products are software alternatives to the search software included in the operating system, helping users sift through desktop files, emails, attachments, and more.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Startpage.com</span> Privacy-focused search engine based in the Netherlands

Startpage is a Dutch search engine company that highlights privacy as its distinguishing feature. The website advertises that it allows users to obtain Google Search results while protecting users' privacy by not storing personal information or search data and removing all trackers. Startpage.com also includes an Anonymous View browsing feature that allows users the option to open search results via proxy for increased anonymity.

Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results.

Microformats (μF) are a set of defined HTML classes created to serve as consistent and descriptive metadata about an element, designating it as representing a certain type of data. They allow software to process the information reliably by having set classes refer to a specific type of data rather than being arbitrary.

Microsoft Advertising is an online advertising platform developed by Microsoft, where advertisers bid to display brief ads, service offers, product listings and videos to web users. It provides pay per click advertising on search engines Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo, as well as on other websites, mobile apps, and videos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Bing</span> Web search engine developed by Microsoft

Microsoft Bing, commonly referred to as Bing, is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET.

A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Hub</span> Public directory of free and open source software (FOSS)

Black Duck Open Hub, formerly Ohloh, is a website which provides a web services suite and online community platform that aims to index the open-source software development community. It was founded by former Microsoft managers Jason Allen and Scott Collison in 2004 and joined by the developer Robin Luckey. As of 15 January 2016, the site lists 669,601 open-source projects, 681,345 source control repositories, 3,848,524 contributors and 31,688,426,179 lines of code.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Info.com</span>

Info is a metasearch engine, which as of 2013, provided results from search engines Google, Yahoo!, Ask, Bing, Yandex, and Open Directory. As of 2004, news search was powered by Topix.net, Info.com's web search engine information was powered by Shopping.com and Info.com had White Page and Yellow Page search. As of 2013, Info.com also had search plugins for Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DuckDuckGo</span> American software company and Web search engine

DuckDuckGo is an American software company that offers a number of products intended to help people protect their online privacy. The flagship product is a search engine that has been praised by privacy advocates. Subsequent products include extensions for all major web browsers and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser.

Schema.org is a reference website that publishes documentation and guidelines for using structured data mark-up on web-pages. Its main objective is to standardize HTML tags to be used by webmasters for creating rich results about a certain topic of interest. It is a part of the semantic web project, which aims to make document mark-up codes more readable and meaningful to both humans and machines.

Web search engines are listed in tables below for comparison purposes. The first table lists the company behind the engine, volume and ad support and identifies the nature of the software being used as free software or proprietary software. The second and third table lists internet privacy aspects along with other technical parameters, such as whether the engine provides personalization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Qwant</span> Search engine based in France

Qwant is a French search engine that launched in February 2013. Qwant is privacy focused, claiming to not track users, resell personal data, or bias the display of search results.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Egerin</span> Web search engine

Egerin is a web search engine. It is the first search engine in Kurdish language and is focused on providing a fully functional search and blog system, including videos, image, and news for the Kurds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Searx</span> Metasearch engine

Searx is a free and open-source metasearch engine, available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the aim of protecting the privacy of its users. To this end, Searx does not share users' IP addresses or search history with the search engines from which it gathers results. Tracking cookies served by the search engines are blocked, preventing user-profiling-based results modification. By default, Searx queries are submitted via HTTP POST, to prevent users' query keywords from appearing in webserver logs. Searx was inspired by the Seeks project, though it does not implement Seeks' peer-to-peer user-sourced results ranking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ontotext GraphDB</span> RDF-store

Ontotext GraphDB is a graph database and knowledge discovery tool compliant with RDF and SPARQL and available as a high-availability cluster. Ontotext GraphDB is used in various European research projects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brave Search</span> Search engine

Brave Search is a search engine developed by Brave Software, Inc., which is set as the default search engine for Brave web browser users in certain countries.

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". www.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. Darrow, Barb (October 13, 2017). "Alibaba Is Adding This Key Technology to Its Growing Cloud". Fortune . Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  18. "Data, Data, Everywhere Data. Now a Better Way to Understand It". 27 March 2015.
  19. "Il dominio Volunia.it è in vendita". MRW.it News.