What is the best search engine?

Ninety-one percent of the world types its questions into one box. The other names here range from privacy holdouts to the giants that box replaced.

1

Google

The search engine that became a verb, handling the overwhelming majority of the world's queries.

2

Bing

Microsoft's search engine, rebuilt around AI answers and wired into Windows and Copilot.

3

DuckDuckGo

The privacy-first engine that keeps no search history and no user profile.

4

Yahoo Search

The 1990s portal that once was the front page of the internet, now powered by Bing behind the scenes.

5

Yandex

The dominant engine across Russian-language search, with its own maps, mail and index.

6

Baidu

China's largest search engine, built for a market Google left in 2010.

7

Brave Search

An engine with its own independent index, built by the Brave browser team.

8

Ecosia

The Berlin engine that spends its ad profit planting trees.

9

Startpage

Google results delivered anonymously, with the tracking stripped out in the middle.

10

Perplexity

An AI answer engine that cites its sources instead of returning ten blue links.

11

Kagi

A paid, ad-free search engine that lets users rank and block domains themselves.

12

AltaVista

The fastest, most complete index of the mid-1990s web, and the engine Google displaced.

13

Ask Jeeves

The natural-language engine with a butler mascot, years before chatbots made the idea work.