Best Search Engine Alternatives

Sure Google has 93% of the search market share, but does that mean it's the best place to search for everything? The short answer is no.

While Google may be the starting point in your quest for conventional (broader) information, it's not always the best place to quickly find what you're looking for.

Here are some examples of websites and apps that serve as alternative starting points to searching on Google.

Note: Google Image and Bing Image are listed as alternative search destinations to conventional search engines even though they are, in fact, actual search engines. But alternative image search is its animal, and the results are (primarily) featured in a separate section of each of these engines, which is why they're listed among the alternatives.

As illustrated above, there are many specialized websites (or apps) that focus on one topic such as travel, music, and shopping. These sites are sometimes referred to as "vertical search engines," their popularity is evidence that the way we search is changing. Many of the sites serve multiple purposes.

For example, LinkedIn is a robust job search engine. Still, it's also a professional social network where companies recruit new talents, users can join groups to exchange information, and people can share and consume content on self-promotion, marketing, advertising, and professional development.

The need (and expectation) to find specialized content quickly drives people to seek search engine alternatives and is causing fragmentation of conventional search — a breaking away (for certain things) from the ever-ubiquitous Google.

Consider the following pie chart:

This chart is a great visualization of how vertical sites like YouTube (video), Amazon (shopping) and Pinterest (images) are fragmenting the search engine pie. Even though Google and Google Images are massive in comparison, all the sites listed above have a huge user base, so there are sites better than Google.