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.

By content/topic

General

Name Language Backend ownership
Ask.com Multilingual Google United States
Baidu Chinese Baidu China
Brave Search Multilingual Brave United States
Dogpile English Metasearch engine
DuckDuckGo Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
Ecosia Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
Elasticsearch Multilingual Apache 2.0 until 2021, then Elasticsearch
Exalead Multilingual Cloudview France
Excite† Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
Gigablast English Apache License 2.0
Google Multilingual Google United States
HotBot English Microsoft Bing United States
Lycos Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
MetaCrawler English Metasearch engine
Microsoft Bing Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
Mojeek Multilingual Mojeek United Kingdom
Opensearch Multilingual Apache License 2.0 (Elasticsearch fork)
Petal Multilingual Huawei China
Qwant Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
Searx Multilingual Metasearch engine
Sogou Multilingual Tencent China
Startpage English Google United States
Swisscows Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
WebCrawler English Microsoft Bing United States
YaCy Multilingual GPL-2.0-or-later
Yahoo! Search† Multilingual Microsoft Bing United States
Yandex Multilingual Yandex Russia
Youdao† Chinese NetEase China
You.com English Microsoft Bing United States

† Main website is a portal

Geographically localized

Name Language Country
Accoona Chinese, English China, United States
Biglobe Japanese Japan
Daum Korean Korea
Nate Korean Korea
Egerin Kurdish Kurdistan (Bing backend[citation needed])
Fireball German, English Germany
Goo Japanese Japan
Leit.is Icelandic, English Iceland
Maktoob Arabic, English Arab World
Miner.hu Hungarian Hungary
Najdi.si Slovenian Slovenia
Naver Korean Korea
Parsijoo Persian Iran
Pipilika Bengali, English Bangladesh
Rambler Russian Russia
Rediff India
Search.ch Switzerland
Sesam Norway, Sweden
Seznam Czech Czech Republic
Walla! Israel
Yahoo! Japan Japanese Japan (Google backend)
Yongzin Tibetan China
ZipLocal English Canada, United States
Qmamu English, Hindi India

Accountancy

Business

Computers

Content

Dark web

Main article: Dark web

Education

General:

Academic materials only:

Enterprise

See also: Enterprise search

Events

Food and recipes

Genealogy

Job

Main article: Job search engine

Legal

Medical

Mobile/handheld

News

People

Real estate/property

Television

Video games

By data type

Search engines dedicated to a specific kind of information

Maps

Multimedia

See also: Multimedia search

Price

Source code

BitTorrent

These search engines work across the BitTorrent protocol.

Blog

Email

Forum

Question and answer

Main article: List of question-and-answer websites

Human answers

Automatic answers

See also: Question answering

By model

Search appliances

Main article: Search appliance

Desktop search engines

Desktop search engines listed on a light purple background are no longer in active development.

Name Platform Remarks License
HP Autonomy Windows IDOL Enterprise Desktop Search, HP Autonomy Universal Search.[2] 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-platform Open-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 volumes Freeware
GNOME Storage Linux Open-source desktop search tool for Unix/Linux GPL
Google Desktop Linux, Mac OS X, Windows Integrates with the main Google search engine page. 5.9 Release supports x64 systems. As of September 14, 2011, Google has discontinued this product. Freeware
ISYS Search Software Windows ISYS:Desktop search software. Proprietary (14-day trial)
Locate32 Windows Graphical port of Unix's locate & updatedb BSD License[3]
Lookeen Windows Desktop search product with Outlook plugin and limited support for other formats via IFilters, uses Lucene search engine. Proprietary (14-day trial)[4]
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/Linux GPL [5]
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 LGPL v2 [6]
Terrier Search Engine Linux, Mac OS X, Unix Desktop search for Windows, Mac OS X (Tiger), Unix/Linux. MPL v1.1[7]
Tracker Linux, Unix Open-source desktop search tool for Unix/Linux GPL v2 [8]
Tropes Zoom Windows Semantic Search Engine (no longer available)[9] Freeware and commercial
Unity Dash Linux Part of Ubuntu Desktop GPL v3,[10] LGPL v2.1[11]
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)[12]

Child-safe search engines

Metasearch engines

Main article: Metasearch engine
Name Language
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

See also: Natural language search engine and Semantic search

Open-source search engines

Web search engine

Enterprise search

See also: Enterprise search

P2P search engines

Name Language
Seeks (open-source) English
YaCy (free and fully decentralized) Multilingual

Privacy search engines

See also: Search engine privacy

Social and environmental focus

Semantic browsing engines

See also: Semantic search
Name Description Speciality
Evi Specialises in knowledge base and semantic search answer engine
Swoogle Searching over 10,000 ontologies Semantic web documents
Yebol defunct
Yummly Semantic web search for food, cooking, and recipes food related

Social search engines

See also: Social search, Relevance feedback, and Human search engine

Usenet

Visual search engines

Main article: Visual search engine

By popularity

Main article: List of search engines by popularity

Defunct or acquired search engines

Name Backend ownership Demise
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
Rectifi Yahoo!
Yippy IBM Watson Redirected to DuckDuckGo in 2021

See also

References

  1. ^ Sullivan, Danny (April 18, 2007). "Goodbye Froogle, Hello Google Product Search!". Search Engine Land. Retrieved 3 June 2018.
  2. ^ "HP Universal Search". Archived from the original on 2015-05-16. Retrieved 2014-07-01.
  3. ^ "Download Locate32 3.1.11.7100". softpedia. 20 August 2012.
  4. ^ "Lookeen 10". Lookeen. Retrieved 2016-02-03.
  5. ^ According to Recoll
  6. ^ According to COPYING inside version 0.5.10 tar.bz2 package.
  7. ^ "Terrier License". GitHub. 13 November 2021.
  8. ^ According to COPYING Archived 2012-07-14 at archive.today in SVN trunk.
  9. ^ "Retrieved 15 August 2015". Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 16 August 2015.
  10. ^ "Unity on GitHub". GitHub. 19 November 2021.
  11. ^ "Required License Files". GitHub. 19 November 2021.
  12. ^ "X1 Search 8". X1 Technologies. Retrieved 12 July 2014.
  13. ^ Darrow, Barb (October 13, 2017). "Alibaba Is Adding This Key Technology to Its Growing Cloud". Fortune. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  14. ^ "Data, Data, Everywhere Data. Now a Better Way to Understand It". 27 March 2015.
  15. ^ PicoSearch, the webpage from January 2008 when the site was 10 years old(WaybackMachine)
  16. ^ PicoSearch May 27 2014 the last Wayback archived version of the page a few weeks before it shutdown](Wayback Machine)
  17. ^ "Goodbye, PicoSearch", Kessler Freedman inc. May 28 2014
  18. ^ "Il dominio Volunia.it è in vendita". MRW.it News.

External links

Web search engines
Categories