This is a cursory review of all the indexing search engines I have been able to find. Gemini engines are at the bottom; the rest of this post is about Web search engines.
The three dominant English search engines with their own indexes¹ are Google, Bing, and Yandex (GBY). Many alternatives to GBY exist, but almost none of them have their own results; instead, they just source their results from GBY.
With that in mind, I decided to test and catalog all the different indexing search engines I could find. I prioritized breadth over depth, and encourage readers to try the engines out themselves if they’d like more information.
I primarily evaluated English-speaking search engines because that’s my primary language. With some difficulty, I could probably evaluate a Spanish one; however, I wasn’t able to find many Spanish-language engines powered by their own crawlers.
This page is a “living document” that I plan on updating indefinitely. Check for updates once in a while if you find this page interesting. Feel free to send me suggestions, updates, and corrections; I’d especially appreciate help from those who speak languages besides English and can evaluate a non-English indexing search engine. Contact info is in the article footer.
## Methodology
I mainly evaluated link results, and didn’t focus too much on (often glaring) privacy issues, “enhanced” or “instant” results (e.g.Wikipedia sidebars, related searches, StackExchange answers), or other elements.
I compared results for esoteric queries side-by-side; if the first 20 results were (nearly) identical to another engine’s results (though perhaps in a slightly different order), they were likely sourced externally and not from an independent index.
I tried to pick queries that should have a good number of results and show variance between search engines. An incomplete selection of queries I tested:
* “vim”, “emacs”, “neovim”, and “nvimrc”: Search engines with relevant results for “nvimrc” typically have a big index. Finding relevant results for the text editors “vim” and “emacs” instead of other topics that share the name is a challenging task.
* “vim cleaner”: should return results related to a line of cleaning products rather than the Correct Text Editor.
* “Seirdy”: My site is relatively low-traffic, but my nickname is pretty unique and visible on several of the highest-traffic sites out there.
* “Project London”: a small movie made with volunteers and FLOSS without much advertising. If links related to the movie show up, the engine’s really good.
* “oppenheimer”: a name that could refer to many things. Without context, it should refer to the physicist who worked on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos. Other historical queries: “magna carta” (intermediate), “the prince” (very hard).
## General indexing search-engines
### Large indexes, good results
These are large engines that pass all the above tests and more.
1. Google: the biggest index. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Powers a few other engines:
* SAPO (Portuguese interface, can work with English results)
2. Bing: the runner-up. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Its index powers many other engines:
* Yahoo
* DuckDuckGo²
* AOL
* Qwant³
* Ecosia
* Ekoru
* Privado
* Findx
* Disconnect Search⁴
* PrivacyWall
* Lilo
* SearchScene
* Peekier
* Oscobo
* Million Short
* Yippy search⁵
* Lycos
* Givero
* Swisscows
* Ask.moe⁶
* Partially powers MetaGer by default; this can be turned off
* At this point, I stopped adding Bing-based search engines. There are just too many.
3. Yandex: originally a Russian search engine, it now has an English version. Some Russian results bleed into its English site. Allows submitting pages and sitemaps for crawling, but requires login. Powers:
* Epic Search
* Occasionally powers DuckDuckGo’s link results instead of Bing.
4. Mojeek: Claims to be privacy-oriented. Quality isn’t at Google/Bing/Yandex’s level, but it’s not bad either. If I had to use Mojeek as my default general search engine, I’d live.
5. Petal search: gopetal.com and petalsearch.com. A very new engine developed by Huawei. Surprisingly good results; it passed all the listed tests. Requires an account to submit sites. I discovered this via my access logs.
=> https://www.gopetal.com/ gopetal.com
=> https://petalsearch.com/ petalsearch.com
### Smaller indexes, relevant results
These engines pass most of the tests listed in the “methodology” section.
* Right Dao : very fast, good results. Passes the tests fairly well.
* Gigablast : It’s been around for a while and also sports a classic web directory. Searches are a bit slow, and it charges to submit sites for crawling. It powers Private.sh. Gigablast is tied with Right Dao for quality.
These engines fail badly at a few important tests.
* seekport : The interface is in German but it supports searching in English just fine. The default language is selected by your locale. It’s really good considering its small index; it hasn’t heard of less common terms (e.g.“Seirdy”), but it’s able to find relevant results in other tests.
* Exalead : slow, quality is hit-and-miss. Its indexer claims to crawl the DMOZ directory, which has since shut down and been replaced by the Curlie directory. No relevant results for “Oppenheimer” and some other history-related queries. Allows submitting individual URLs for indexing, but requires solving a Google reCAPTCHA and entering an email address.
* wbsrch : In addition to its generalist search, it also has many other utilities related to domain name statistics. Failed multiple tests. Its index is a bit dated; it has an old backlog of sites it hasn’t finished indexing. It also has several dedicated per-language indexes.
* ExactSeek : small index, disproportionately dominated by big sites. Failed multiple tests. Allows submitting individual URLs for crawling, but requires entering an email address and receiving a newsletter. Webmaster tools seem to heavily push for paid SEO options.
* Meorca: A UK-based search engine that claims not to "index pornography or illegal content websites". It also features a public blog with a marketplace and free games. Allows submitting URLs, but requires a full name, email, phone number, and "business name" to do so. Discovered in the seirdy.one access logs.
* search.tl: Generalist search for one TLD at a time (defaults to .com). I'm not sure why you'd want to always limit your searches to a single TLD, but now you can.⁷ There isn't any visible UI for changing the TLD for available results; you need to add/change the "tld" URL paramater. For example, to search .org sites, append "&tld=org" to the URL. It seems to be connected to Amidalla.de, but Amidalla doesn't seem to currently be operational. Amidalla allows users to manually add URLs to its index and directory; I have yet to see if doing so impacts search.tl results.
* Crawlson: young, slow. In this category because its index has a cap of 10 URLs per domain. I initially discovered Crawlson in the seirdy.one access logs. The site seems to be down right now, so I didn’t link it.
* Anoox: Results are few and irrelevant; fails to find any results for basic terms. Allows site submission. It's also a lightweight social network and claims to be powered by its users, letting members vote on listings to alter rankings.
These indexing search engines don’t have a Google-like “ask me anything” endgame; they’re trying to do something different. You aren't supposed to use these engines the same way you use GBY.
* Wiby: I love this one. It focuses on smaller independent sites that capture the spirit of the “early” web. It’s more focused on “discovering” new interesting pages that match a set of keywords than finding a specific resources. I like to think of Wiby as an engine for surfing, not searching. Runnaroo occasionally features a hit from Wiby. If you have a small site or blog that isn’t very “commercial”, consider submitting it to the index.
I’m unable to evaluate these engines properly since I don’t speak the necessary languages. English searches on these are a hit-or-miss. I might have made a few mistakes in this category.
### Big indexes
* Baidu: Chinese
* Qihoo 360: Chinese. I’m not sure how independent this one is.
* Sogou: Chinese
* Yisou: Chinese
* Naver: Korean.
* Seznam: Czech, seems relatively privacy-friendly. Discovered in the seirdy.one access logs.
* Cốc Cốc: Vietnamese
=> https://search.naver.com Naver
=> https://www.seznam.cz/ Seznam
=> https://coccoc.com/search Cốc Cốc
### Smaller indexes
* Parsijoo: Persian
* search.ch: Regional search engine for Switzerland; users can restrict searches to their local regions.
* Ask.com: the main site shut down, but subdomains like uk.ask.com are still alive. They claim to outsource search results. The results seem similar to Google, Bing, and Yandex; however, I can’t pinpoint exactly where their results are coming from.
* Not evaluated: Apple’s search. It’s only accessible through a search widget in iOS and macOS and shows very few results. This might change; see the next section.
* Partially evaluated: Infinity Search young, small index. It recently split into a paid offering with the main index and Infinity Decentralized, the latter of which allows users to select from community-hosted crawlers. I managed to try it out before it became a paid offering, and it seemed decent; however, I wasn’t able to run the tests listed in the “Methodology” section. Allows submitting URLs and sitemaps into a text box, no other work required.
These engines aren’t ready yet; their indexes are either in a proof-of-concept phase with a handful of sites, or aren’t available yet.
* Apple: given the activity of the AppleBot crawler lately, their index will almost certainly grow to a size large enough to power a general search engine soon. Check your server’s access logs; there’s a good chance it’s crawled your site if you have a few backlinks.
* Brave announced that it will start its own independent search engine based on the now-discontinued Cliqz. I don’t endorse the company, but I hope its results will be available through metasearch engines like Searx.
=> https://searchengine.party/ Search Engine Party
## Notes
¹ Yes, “indexes” is an acceptable plural form of the word “index”. The word “indices” sounds weird to me outside a math class.
² DuckDuckGo has a crawler called DuckDuckBot. This crawler doesn’t impact the linked results displayed; it just grabs favicons and scrapes data for a few instant answers
³ Qwant claims to also use its own crawler for results, but it’s still mostly Bing. Try a side-by-side comparison; I found that it doesn’t seem to have anything besides Bing results.
⁴ Disconnect Search allows users to have results proxied from Bing or Yahoo, but Yahoo sources its results from Bing.
⁵ Yippy claims to be powered by a certain IBM brand (a brand that could correspond to any number of products) and annotates results with the phrase “Yippy Index”, but a side-by-side comparison with Bing and other Bing-based engines revealed results to be nearly identical.
⁶ Ask.moe was working on a FLOSS indexer; its search page stated an intention to switch to it from Bing at one point. This statement has since been removed.
⁷ Google and Bing support the "site:" search operator to limit searches to subpages/subdomains of a single site, but it can also limit searches to a single TLD. "site:.one", for instance, limits searches to websites with the ".one" TLD.
