Everyone in the world is well acquainted with the internet. Google has almost become synonymous with the world wide web in the popular culture psyche. We use the Google search engine for really everything that we need to know — be it the books that you want to buy, things that you want to shop for or the assignments that you want to complete.
The Menlo Park-headquartered tech giant is undoubtedly the most used search engine in the world, but there are some excellent alternatives available as well. Here is a list of such popular search yet niche engines which offer more than what Google does:
1.DuckDuckGo: This multimillion dollar company, which was founded by a Physics and Technology Policy major and MIT graduate Gabriel Weinberg, is the one that absolutely respects your privacy. It does not collect your browsing history, social media profiles, emails, or anything or of that sort. The website is very popular among tech enthusiasts who understand the importance of privacy in search histories. It comes as a very user-friendly engine for its features like ‘zero-click’ information, infinite scroll and prompts to clarify your questions. It also has much lesser ads spam than Google.
2.Swisscows: This is another search engine which respects your privacy, it does not track your data, filter results or show behavioural ads. Although it is not as efficient as DuckDuckGo when it comes to maintaining privacy, it makes use of artificial intelligence to determine the context of a user’s query.
3.Slideshare: If you are a student, or involved in an academic background as a profession, you will find this search engine very useful. It searches documented slideshow presentation, pdfs and e-books. You can easily save slides for future use and download the entire slideshow directly from this tool. It is now hosted by LinkedIn.
4.Peekier: This search engine also has the basic premise of DuckDuckGo. It takes the search results from Bing and absolutely does not place cookies or save your IP address or any other information. The search keywords are not saved, but are stored strictly for service purposes. On top of that, its entirely flat design makes Peekier look more appealing than other search engines and the search result page is displayed as a configurable grid.
5.Wiki.com: If you prefer community-led information to look at, such as information on pages like Wikipedia, this is the best search engine for you. It presents to you all the information only available on different wikis. Needless to say, it is created and edited by volunteers across the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
6.Internet Archive: It lists all the documented material, be it books or video or music or any software. It is very popular for a tool called Wayback Machine which is a digital archive of the internet content, consisting of snapshots of web pages across time. It was founded by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, who were also the founders of Alexa Internet, now an Amazon company.
7.Ecosia: This environment-friendly search engine uses the revenues generated the queries to plant trees. It needs 45 searches to plant a new tree in Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Indonesia and Peru.
8.Startpage: This is another search engine which is concerned with data privacy. It does not track and store your data or present you hyper personalised ads. However, this engine is powered by Google and does use ads to generate revenue. Each search result allows users to browse the following site anonymously using an option called ‘proxy’.
Google is great, but if you want a search engine for specific purposes or you have data privacy concerns, these are some of the best options to go with. However, if you need an all-around search, Google is always an excellent option.
