Alternative Search Engines to Bookmark
by Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — software documentation tool
Google is gradually taking over the world gathering tons of our personal info, our locations, searches, YouTube history and many more. But there are thousands of other search engines out there in the web.
In this post, we’ll take a look at
- private search engines
- general search engines
- social media search engines
- image & icon search engines
- search engines to search for people
- other search engines
Private Search Engines that Do Not Track You
Private search engines have the same functionality as traditional search engines. The difference here is that private search engines protect users’ information via encrypted search terms, scrambling IP addresses or they just don’t tract or store any information about you unlike Google.
“I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”
Edward Snowden
So the first part of this list is devoted to private search engines that don’t track you or store any personal information.
DuckDuckGo is probably the most popular alternative search engine that does not track your actions. One of its coolest features is “bangs” that allows users directly search other sites, like Amazon, Wikipedia or YouTube, by starting their query with an exclamation mark!
Startpage
Startpage provides search results while protecting your searches and avoiding tracking your steps. It also offers browsing through a proxy server to protect you from websites tracking your IP address or location.
“Privacy is a basic human right”
Robert E.G. Beens, Startpage CEO
Disconnect Search
This one uses content search of major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo but it doesn’t track your online searches or activities or IP address. Disconnect Search lets you surf by location so that you can get location specific results. It also informs about which tools are protected and unprotected, letting you choose which to use.
Lukol
Lukol is considered as one of the best private search engines that protects from online fraudsters and keeps the spammers away by safeguarding you from misleading or inappropriate sites. It ensures full anonymity of your searches.
MetaGer
MetaGer lets you make untraceable searches. It also integrates a proxy server allowing you to open links anonymously and keep your IP address hidden from the destination server. MetaGer prohibits third parties to target you for ads or any malicious attacks.
Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn’t be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet.
Gary Kovacs
Gibiru
Gibiru is presently based on modified Google Search algorithm that limits tracking of your internet behavior and privacy thus removing behavioral search result filtering and censoring so that you get natural untargeted search results. For Maximum privacy, Gibiru recommends Firefox set in Private Browsing mode with the AnonymoX plugin installed.
When you use Qwant as a search engine, we don’t put any cookie on your browser that may allow us or others to recognize you or to follow you everywhere on the Internet. We don’t use any tracking device (pixel, fingerprinting…). We don’t collect and we don’t store any history or your searches. When you search, your query is instantly anonymized by being dissociated from your IP address, in accordance with what the French data controller advices. Long story short, what you are doing with Qwant is part of your privacy and we don’t want to know.
General Search Engines
Yandex
Yandex is a Russian service provider offering search engine, mail, maps and more. Its search service allows searching for images, videos and more.
Ecosia is a web search engine, which donates 80% of its surplus income to plant trees. It lets you search for web, images, news, videos and more.
Teoma
Teoma is an Internet search engine with its own link popularity algorithm. It lets people search for web, images & videos, news, recipes and more.
Social Media Search Engines
Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
Social Searcher
Social Searcher is a free social media search engine. It allows to search for content in social networks in real-time and provides deep analytics data. Users can search without logging in for publicly posted information on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion and Vimeo. Free users can also save their searches and set up email alerts.
Image & Icon Search Engines
Iconfinder
Iconfinder provides high-quality icons to millions of creative professionals. We are a small international team based in the lovely city of Copenhagen, with some of us working remotely. Together with a passionate community of icon designers, we are building the world’s most popular icon site.
There you’ll find a collection of free and premium icons.
Flaticon
Flaticon offers users, high quality graphic designs: totally editable vectors carefully selected by our design team in order to provide our users with great content that can be used in both personal and commercial projects.
TinEye
Using TinEye, you can search by image or perform what we call a reverse image search. You can do that by uploading an image, or searching by URL. You can also simply drag and drop your images to start your search.
TinEye constantly crawls the web and adds images to its index. Today, the TinEye index is over 30.2 billion images.
Picsearch
Picsearch image search technology has three main features that make it unique. It has a relevancy unrivalled on the web due to its patent-pending indexing algorithms. Also, Picsearch has a family friendliness that allows children to surf in safety as all offensive material is filtered out by our advanced filtering systems. The site is also very user friendly as it’s designed to be simple, fast and accurate.
Search Engines to Search for People
Spokeo
Spokeo is a people search engine that organizes white pages listings, public records and social network information into simple profiles to help you safely find and learn about people.
Pipl
With the world’s largest people search engine, Pipl is the place to find the person behind the email address, social username or phone number.
PeekYou
PeekYou is a free people search site that places people at the center of the Internet. It lets you discover the people most important and relevant to your life. It collects and combines scattered content from social sites, news sources, homepages, and blog platforms to present comprehensive online identities.
Other Search Engines
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.” It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million public-domain books. As of October 2016, its collection topped 15 petabytes. In addition to its archiving function, the Archive is an activist organization, advocating for a free and open Internet.
SearchCode
SearchCode is a source code and documentation search engine, providing programmers the ability to search for functions or code snippets. Search over projects from Github, Bitbucket, Google Code, Codeplex, Sourceforge, Fedora Project, GitLab and more.
Do you use any other search engines? What do you like the most about them? Would you add a new category to this list? What search engines would it include? Please, share in the comments and I’ll add them to the list.
Have a nice day!
Bradley Nice,
Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors
