A search engine is software, usually accessed on the Internet, that searches a database of information according to the user's query. The engine provides a list of results that best match what the user is trying to find. Today, there are many different search engines available on the Internet, each with their own abilities and features.
The information may be a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Internet content that is not capable of being searched by a web search engine is generally described as the deep web.
Today, the most popular and well-known search engine is Google. Other popular search engines include AOL, Ask.com, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo.
Google
The search engine giant holds the first place in search with a stunning difference of 65% from second in place Bing. According to the latest netmarketshare report (November 2018) 73% of searches were powered by Google and only 7.91% by Bing. Google is also dominating the mobile/tablet search engine market share with 81%.
Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in search, but despite their efforts they still did not manage to convince users that their search engine can produce better results than Google.
Their search engine market share is constantly below 10%, even though Bing is the default search engine on Windows PCs.
Yahoo
Yahoo is one the most popular email providers and holds the fourth place in search with 3.90% market share.
From October 2011 to October 2015, Yahoo search was powered exclusively by Bing. Since October 2015 Yahoo agreed with Google to provide search-related services and since then the results of Yahoo are powered both by Google and Bing. Yahoo is also the default search engine for Firefox browsers in the United States (since 2014).
Ask.com
Formerly known as Ask Jeeves, Ask.com receives approximately 0.42% of the search share. ASK is based on a question/answer format where most questions are answered by other users or are in the form of polls.
It also has the general search functionality but the results returned lack quality compared to Google or even Bing and Yahoo.
AOL.com
According to netmarketshare the old time famous AOL is still in the top 10 search engines with a market share that is close to 0.06%. The AOL network includes many popular web sites like engadget.com, techchrunch.com and the huffingtonpost.com. On June 23, 2015, AOL was acquired by Verizon Communications.
DuckDuckGo
Has a number of advantages over the other search engines. It has a clean interface, it does not track users, it is not fully loaded with ads and has a number of very nice features.
Baidu
Baidu was founded in 2000 and it is the most popular search engine in China. Its market share is increasing steadily and according to Wikipedia, Baidu is serving billion of search queries per month. It is currently ranked at position 4, in the Alexa Rankings.
