The Most Underrated Search Engines That Aren’t Google

It’s an easy mistake to focus your efforts solely on the Google search engine at the expense of everything else. They have the majority of the traffic, right? The fact is that you can work with a large range of other search engines out there to improve the results of your SEO efforts.

Some engines are particularly focused and efficient in certain areas that naturally draw different industries and users towards them. That kind of targeted work can help you enormously if you have a clearly defined target demographic for your work.

With organic results being moved further and further away from page one of the average SERP and new features like voice search rolling frequently, the game is changing.

The sentiment is also moving against Google. A monopoly is well earned in this case but leaves users feeling uneasy about the stranglehold the company has over the web. Google features such as content filtering give even more power to users who end up in their own bubbles, and targeted advertising leaves many looking to alternative popular search engines.

In this article, we’ll go over a list of alternatives to the big G that you might find useful.

Bing

Not a huge surprise to see this one at the top of the list. While any SEO expert who wasn’t born yesterday will know about Bing, it’s straight fact that it’s often overlooked in terms of priorities.

Bing has a few key characteristics that make it an interesting prospect for your next piece of work.

Created and maintained by Microsoft this engine has a lot to offer and is being picked up more as people move away from Google.

Key points for Bing include its video search engine. It’s fantastic.

With a better view via a fast-loading grid layout than what Google offers people are commonly using this for their video search efforts by default. Reasons for needing a grid view vary from business to more personal requirements! This is a great feature that pulls a lot of traffic Bing’s way.

Bing is also very smart at providing auto corrections for your search requests. It averages about twice as many as Google can manage and they are often very accurate and intuitive to the nature of the original search.

A key point for SEOs is that Bing has a feature where it can highlight all best-ranked outbound links from a specific domain using the link from the domain line. Great for working out what traffic goes where.

DuckDuckGo

This engine was spawned from the discussion for greater internet privacy.

Search engines working to ensure your privacy, such as Tor, are often quite inconvenient and slow and not fit for the average user who is only interested in protecting an element of their privacy.

DuckDuckGo is a great all-around search engine whose main pull is that it doesn’t store search data from its users. This has meant a lot of traffic being sent its way as users shy away from the omniscient Eye of Mordor-style data retention of Google.

While the word hasn’t spread massively about this one outside of the tech and privacy-savvy crowd it’s picking up steam and is worth a look.

Quora

This is a very interesting and trendy site. It’s a cross between a tailored search engine and an Ask Yahoo-style community. Happily, the quality is a little higher than the question-and-answer madness often inhabiting the Yahoo site!

Quora is gathering quite a crowd to it that is drawn by its warm community feel. When you set up your profile and add in your preferred subjects and knowledge areas you are brought to a landing page that is a cross between a Facebook news feed and a Google search page.

It’s an interesting method where you put in your search query and it treats it like a question and provides links to previous questions and discussions as you might receive auto-correct suggestions.

If you can’t find anything you can then pose your search as a question to be answered by users with that area set as their interest or knowledge specialty.

There’s potential here for a lot of canny SEO work and organic link-building (franchise marketing experts have been using Quora for a while now). It’s worth a look.

Dogpile

Now, this is a clever one.

Dogpile might look a little bit messy at first glance but there is a method to the madness.

Dogpile’s offering is that it gathers search results from all other major search engines and curates and presents them on its own SERP.

Critically it also removes all ads. This means you can pull results from all the big players to get a comprehensive result for your query.

That combined with a lack of ads on the page means that this is a relatively little-known gem very suitable for research and business use.

There’s some potential for SEO here also in that you can check the rankings of a number of different engines in one go to see how your ranking is doing.

Creative Commons Search

This isn’t a run-of-the-mill search engine for general use. CCS is a clever little site where you can search among a range of different sites and topics to find images that aren’t yet copyrighted.

That can be useful for SEO image optimization and a plethora of other uses.

It’s very handy to have up your sleeve for a variety of reasons. If you’re building a site and don’t want to get sued for example!

Worth keeping in the bookmarks list.

WolframAlpha

Wolfram is a fantastic community and site that has been around for some time now.

Referred to as a computational knowledge form of engine this one has a clever knack where it will calculate any available data and details to provide a tailored answer to your search.

It’s great for academic use as it has a feature where it can compute your answer in real-time and provide a referenced answer to a query.

Perhaps a little more on the niche side but well regarded and used within its area and very well designed and laid out.

Closing Thoughts

We hope you’ve found this small list helpful.

There’s a lot out there that can be of benefit to an SEO in a variety of ways. It’s good to think outside the box and be less reliant on Google!

As you can see these other search engines generally fall into two main categories.

You’ve got a general search engine that is similar to Google but used more by a certain demographic. DuckDuckGo is an example of this where the more tech-savvy and privacy-oriented have flocked towards it (put intentionally). That gives a good opportunity for targeted work.

Alternatively, you’ve got engines like CCS and Wolfram that are great for your own resource and research-gathering efforts. These ones can help arm you further for your future work.

There’s a lot out there and as the Google goliath rumbles on and dissent over privacy and metadata continues to be discussed the odds are high that users will look elsewhere.

Be sure to keep a finger on that pulse and you’ll be sure to do well.