Search Engine Review

All General Purpose Search Engines Covered

Search Engine Review: General Purpose Search Engines Covered
May 5, 2019 MadMarTech

Though there are a lot of search engines available, Google has been dominating the search market for a while now. They have done fabulous improvement in their search algorithm by making the search results more relevant to the user query. However, there are so many other search engines available that you could use instead of Google. We have compiled an exhaustive list of search engines that you could use for different queries when you surf online. We will also have a deeper look at why you should use them and also have a discussion on their limitations. Here is the list of search engines we will discuss: (Click to jump section)

DuckDuckGo Search Engine

 

DuckDuckGo is gaining wide popularity mainly because of privacy protection. Monopolies like Google have been tracking every single click, categorizing, and building profiles to target you in every possible way. The informed users have been shifting to DuckDuckGo in order to stay anonymous online. DuckDuckGo still displays ads but only based on the search queries and not based on who you are.

What We Like About DuckDuckGo:

 

✔ Privacy is Very Important to You

DuckDuckGo has made a really strong claim on their site that no matter what they will never track you, ever. All the money they generate is purely based on search terms and not based on your profile/audience.

✔ Non-Targeted Fair Search Results

As Google is tracking you, providing tailored results that you would most probably click. Google knows you more than it should know about you. Due to this fact, you would get ‘filtered results’. This means that your search feed will be totally different from your friend’s feed. If you would like totally unbiased results then we would definitely recommend DuckDuckGo.

✔ A lot of Shortcuts

There are so many fun features DuckDuckGo provides. You could use !bangs to directly search on other major sites. It is very robust once you get used to it and also the SERPs are really fast.

✔ Less Number of Ads

Aren’t you tired of ads everywhere? Well, here is a small example: Look below there are 5 ad positions and you need to scroll down a bunch to reach an organic result. This can get frustrating at times. But by now, we are so immune to this that we fail to realize that these are ad results.

✔ Featured Snippet or Subtle Position Zero

It has been becoming an increasing concern that millennials are not clicking on the search results anymore due to featured snippets. Somehow we do not like it because it forces you to perceive what Google thinks is ‘relevant’. However, DDG has better small snippets on the left side not intruding the usual organic feed. You can see it in the image above wherein the programmatic advertising definition is on the right.

✔ Faster SERPs

We know Google has put in all the money and employees to make sure that the SERPs load at the fastest speed possible. But as they use n number of different tracking parameters, the code snippets slow down the results. After we started using DuckDuckGo, we can notice the difference in the speed at which the SERPs are being displayed.


 

What we don’t like about DuckDuckGo:

 

✘ Localized Info

The local info displayed on DDG is not impressive. The user interface is not as friendly as it is with Google where we can find all the info at once with a click of a button. Hey! The price you pay for privacy.

✘ Too Accustomed to Google Style of Search Queries

Let’s all admit it, Google gets you. Yes, they track you. In order to demonstrate what we are trying to say. You would definitely check the weather forecast every day to see which overcoat to wear. Well, we are so used to just typing weather – pin code and the right results pop up. It is not the case with DDG. It does not show up all the time. Their search algorithm has definitely plummeted at a very good rate but still, there is room for improvement. Or maybe we are just too used to using Google?


 

WolframAlpha Search Engine

wolframalpha search engine

WolframAlpha is a computational search engine and is so different than other search engines. It uses its vast knowledge and super computational power to give answers to even the most difficult mathematical equation. Even though you cannot use this as a general-purpose search engine, you could do much more than what you could accomplish with a general-purpose search engine. Here are some fun things you could do with it:

Get Step-by-Step Solution to Any Mathematical Equation

wolframalpha search engine pros and cons

Complete Nutritional Analysis of Anything

Wolramalpha engine search for nutrition

Keep a check on your personal health

monitor fitness level using wolramalpha search engine features

If you would like to have answers to your questions with complete analysis then this search engine is great! The things that you could accomplish with this search engine are endless.


 

Bing Search Engine

Bing search engine review

Bing search engine is one of the most used search engines after Google. It is a general purpose search engine that is available in 40 languages. Though Bing did not start off well, it has improved a lot in the past 2 years and it looks very identical to Google. Let us now discuss the pros and cons of using Bing as your general purpose search engine.

What We Like About Bing

 

✔Awesome Music Search

If you type the name of a song on Bing, you will get the video as a featured snippet and also the lyrics of the song on the left. There is a little box with all the information about the song including artist, song duration, release year and other info. We believe it is an awesome feature to get all the relevant info with one search term.

✔ Rewards Program

bing search engine rewards program

Bing actually pays you to search on their search engine. Every time you use the search engine, you collect points and you can redeem using gift cards from Amazon, Skype, Xbox, and more. It is not a lot of money, but hey any money is good money! Especially when you have to do nothing more than setting bing as default.

✔ Advanced Image Search

Bing has advanced image search options as compared to Google and other search engines. They have advanced search filters like layout, people, color, and type. For example, if you would like to get a “face only pic” of your favorite celebrity you can filter it as well.

✔ Better Local Search Results

bing search engine pros and cons

Bing has better local search results as compared to Google. It has this horizontal clip of images with all the price info along with good filters on the results including cuisine, rating, hours, etc.

What We don’t Like about Bing

 

✘Privacy

Just like Google, Bing does not give much importance to privacy. They monitor your activity, build audiences using your profile and also sell your data to the advertisers. If privacy is your major concern, Bing is not the search engine for you.

✘Cluttered Results: Too much info

Bing provides a lot of information. Oh yes, it may be a good thing but we feel that the results are too cluttered. The results are very relevant and the interface is in fact very similar to Google but still lacks the clean interface that Google provides.

✘No voice search

Voice search has been rising at a very phenomenal rate especially on mobile. 20% of the searches on mobile were done using voice search. However, Bing does not have the voice search feature as of now. Maybe in the future?

✘Not preferred for Technical Search

Bing is not a preferred search engine for Engineers or scientists as it does not return satisfactory results for search terms specific to the high tech industry. However, there has been a major improvement in their search algorithms to improve the relevance of the search results to the user search query.


Ecosia Search Engine

Ecosia search engine: alternative to google

 

Ecosia is a German company that is missioned towards Greener Earth. The company roughly makes around 0.5 EUR for every search and they claim to plant one tree for every 56 searches. The search engine also displays the number of trees planted until now and it has been growing every second. Sounds like a good charity idea isn’t it? The users would also feel good using the search engine that does more than making money to big ass conglomerates. Well let us see how well they work as a search engine.

What We Like About Ecosia

 

✔ Good for the Environment

ecosia is a green search engine

Ecosia search engine was created for a charitable cause. The main motto of the search engine is to plant trees and donates a major chunk of profit to plant trees. Well, it makes you feel good that you are working towards the right cause just by surfing on the web.

✔ Privacy

The search engine gives a lot of importance to privacy. They do not profile their users and sell it to advertisers. This means that they are not chasing you across the web to “remarket”. Ecosia also encrypts the searches, this means that your search is very private and no one has access to your search history.

 

What We Don’t Like About Ecosia

 

✘ Questions not very well answered

cons of using ecosia

If you type in a query like a “5 EUROS to USD” other major search engines would show the USD value of 5 euros within the blink of an eye. However, Ecosia does not seem to get it. It just shows a bunch of ordinary SERPs without thinking about the context. This is kind of disappointing as the main job of a search engine is to answer a search query

✘ Very Wierd Ads

ecosia engine search cons

One thing we noticed while using Ecosia is that the ads are totally irrelevant. When we typed in a search query called “where to go on vacation” the first ad that popped up was an Amazon Ad with a generalistic landing page (homepage) and had nothing to do with vacation


 

Yahoo Search Engine

Yahoo search engine

Once upon a time, a monopoly now just another search engine. Well, we are not a fan of Yahoo but let us try to provide our view on both the positive and negative side of this search engine:

What We Like About Yahoo

 

✔ Yahoo Answers

You would have access to one of the biggest answer pools for every search query you type in. It seamlessly integrates with the organic results.

✔ Advance Image Search Filters

Yahoo image search has advanced features choosing the type of the image including line drawing clipart etc along with color filtering.

✔ Fun Search Filter Options

yahoo search engine review: recipie filter function

 

You can filter out recipes results or sports results without typing in the search query. There are multiple filtering options within those filters like ingredients you want or time needed to prepare etc.

✔ Feed

Yahoo has aggregated news feed which automatically appears as a top menu bar which you could scroll through if you are bored. As it is a news feed, it keeps you hooked with all the latest update about your favorite topic.

What We Don’t Like About Yahoo

 

✘ Too Many Ads, Low Organic Search Result Volume

yahoo search engine cons

Hardly 5-6 results are organic and the rest is completely filled with ads. We are not saying Google is better but this is still way too many ad placements. This is frustrating because not all the ads are relevant even though Yahoo spends a lot of money to keep the users on the browser. As you can see the last result in the image is organic, rest are not.

✘ The less frequent appearance of a Featured snippet

The featured snippet hardly appears on Yahoo. We do not expect it to appear for every search query, but instead of showing qualified results, all we can get is a Yahoo answer which is usually sub-par quality. The featured snippet that shows up is not that informative as compared to the one we are used to getting from Google.

✘ Privacy Issue

Just like Google, Yahoo tracks you, build a persona and sells your private information to the advertisers. Hence this is a no go if you are sensitive about privacy. This is a predominant issue with all the major search engines


 

Search Encrypt Search Engine

search encrypt search engine review

 

Search Encrypt is also a very “pro-privacy” search engine. Just like DuckDuckGo, they claim to have unfiltered results that are usually excluded while taking your user persona/profiling into consideration.  The search engine encrypts the search terms, that means that you cannot find your search query in your browser history or anywhere else in your computer. Let us have a look at the plus and the minus of this search engine:

What We Like About  Search Encrypt

 

✔ User Privacy

As discussed above, they minimize tracking you everywhere and is an extremely “private” search engine. This provides a higher level of privacy by using encryption advanced security.

✔ Good User Interface

The search engine has a decent user interface with multiple general search categories like web, images, videos, news, shopping, and maps.

What We Don’t Like SearchEncrypt

 

✘ Irrelevant Ads to Search Terms

search engine search encrypt ads

Just to make a quick check we typed, “who invented the internet” and instead of showing the answers to the above questions, a bunch of internet providers ads showed up. And the organic search results were not that relevant either.

✘ No maps, No Local

If you would like to get quick results for “near me” it does not work with search encrypt. Even though there is a tab called “map” within the user interface it still does not work well with the search terms. If you would like to explore “Thai food” near your locality for a dinner search encrypt will not be of much help.

✘ Absence of Language Filters

If you are an expat and have trouble speaking the language, you would have trouble surfing the web too! There are no language filters available in search encrypt where you can actually filter out “English results only”. This would be a really good feature to have so that the users are not deterred away by this sole factor.


 

DogPile Search Engine

review on dogpile search engine

Dogpile search engine is a “metasearch engine” which means that it fetches the search results from all the major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. We would not recommend using dogpile as the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, but you could evaluate it yourself based on the inputs below:

What We Like About Dogpile

 

✔ Very Relevant Results for General Search

The relevancy of dogpile search results to a search query is really high. Most of the results are unbiased and some results that came up on the top page were completely new and were not found in other search engines.

✔ Faster Results

Dogpile appears to load the search engine results page faster than other search engines. Even though it aggregates and pulls out the results from different directories looks like it is pretty

What We Don’t Like About Dogpile

 

✘ The outdated User Interface

dogpile search engine review: detailed list of cons

The aesthetic part of Dogpile looks pretty outdated. It feels like you are searching the web in the ’90s. With really bright blue and light green as the SERPs colors, you would not really feel like staying on site. Even the indexed images are compiled in a way that deters users off-site.

✘ Nonintuitive search engine

Even though it renders the relevant search results, it still lacks the basic functionalities like providing direct answers to search queries like ‘weather city’ etc.

✘ No Localized Search Results

Just made a simple search on “Hairdresser near me” and the results were pretty inaccurate. There were no maps or any kind of useful suggestion. You should definitely not use dogpile if you would like to have any localized services or anything that has to do with “near me”.

✘ Unclear Division between Ads and Organic Results

The ads are very haphazard and sometimes it is very difficult to identify if it is an ad or an organic search results. The search engine really needs to make a clear distinction so that the user is well informed and knows what he is clicking.

✘ Vague Search Results for High Tech Search

If you are a programmer or an electronic engineer, good luck finding what you need. Dogpile users have complained that the technical search query hardly shows the relevant results.

✘ Non-Acculumated Searches

We made a small search query test to check on the best places to visit in Greece. The top 4 search results were from TripAdvisor. We are so used to using major search engines, which provides aggregated results by domain. It starts to look strange when the same domain dominates the whole SERPs providing users less variety to choose from.


 

Ask.com Search Engine

Search engine ask.com review

Ask.com has been around for a while now but ironically it still does not provide the answers to the questions you have asked. You can, however, do a video search within the interface. The video filters are good providing basic functions like filter by video length, type, and relevancy.  First 5-6 positions are filled with irrelevant ads, it does not give a first good impression. As the search engine does not have the map feature integrated the local search/ “near me” search is not pertinent. All in all, we do not recommend to use this search engine.


 

AOL Search Engine

AOL.com search engine review

AOL is one of the oldest search engines and has more than 8 million users per month. It provides all the general purpose search engine functions like web, images, and video search with time-based filters. Though it does not use the contextual/ intent based search results, it still manages to provide relevant results to the user search terms. There is also a mix of video results within the search results. AOL is much better than ask.com but still lacks the localized features to display relevant search results for the nearest restaurant / any other services. It provides direct answers to simple questions like currency conversions and weather reports. AOL.com is relevant and a good search engine but still lacks advanced search features as compared to Google and Bing.


 

Baidu Search Engine

Baidu search engine review

Baidu is the “Google” of China. It is the only search engine which has the highest number of single country users. The search engine majorly is designed for the Chinese market, you could still find English only results in a filter within the webpage. And also it has a lot of censorship. Unless you speak the language or live in the country (they have the best-localized results within China) we would not recommend using Baidu as your search engine.


 

 

Yandex Search Engine

yandex search engine

Yandex is a very prominent search engine among Russian speaking regions. It is like Baidu of Russia and it provides 360 solutions like Google including Yandex mail, maps, images, video, etc. The search engine has a low tolerance towards spam pages, hence uses keywords to rank pages and the UX also plays a key.

We liked the UX as well. The logo appears on the right side of every search result and is a mix of video, images, and a web result. It has the best search results for Russian web pages and also provides pertinent localized results. Adding to that, Yandex has its own browser and is safer for browsing especially due to its “protect” feature.


 

Info.com Search Engine

info.com search engine review

Info.com is a metasearch engine that fetches results from multiple large search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc. It has a clean user interface at the start page and provides general services like web search, images, videos, and news. When we typed in the search term, we found that the search engine has too many ad placements as compared to organic results. However, unlike other small search engines, the ads are very relevant to what we typed in. A plus one for that may be?

We did like the nice little bubbles called “social topic”  that popped up. When you click on that bubble, it shows all the social media posts that are related to your search term. On the same note, the image section is very small and has a lot of white spaces on the right which makes it look less premium as compared to Google/Bing.

All in all, it is an average search engine providing somewhat relevant results but still needs a lot of improvement.