30-second summary:

• Google launched over 4,000 search improvements and new features throughout 2020.
• Baidu continued to crack down on poor quality sites with its 2020 updates its StrongWind algorithm was introduced to control aggregator content from malicious sites.
• Bing attempted to build on its approximately 2.8% global search engine market share by adding a Bing app to Xbox.
• Throughout the year, DuckDuckGo added a number of new features and made updates designed to improve the user experience while protecting privacy.
• GIPHY now serves more than 7 billion GIFs per day and is seen by more than 500 million daily optimizing GIFs is a great way for SEO to drive awareness and keep people engaged with your website page(s).
• Throughout 2020 Yandex continued to add more human elements into its search engine.
• 2020 was a year where search took central stage in digital marketing.
• Consumer behavior is still set to continue to be volatile in 2021.
• A list of key SEO trends to watch in 2021 – new channels for visual and image search opportunities, international SEO will rise once again, combining PPC and SEO, utilizing Marketing technology, and more.

Many an SEO will be huddled around the television or computer screen this year for New Year celebrations, muttering, “Don’t let the door hit you,” as we bid 2020 goodbye. Despite the release of several vaccinations worldwide, we still find ourselves firmly in the grip of a global pandemic with no definitive end in sight.

In this post, we’ll take a look back at how top search engines changed the game this past year, and where marketers should be looking as we head into 2021 with continuing uncertainty about the year ahead.

Key search engine updates in 2020

The latest figures from Oberlo show that Google reigns as the dominant search engine both in the US and worldwide with 88.1% and 92.3% market share, respectively. Even so, there’s a lot of traffic left on the table if you aren’t optimizing for all of the top search engines.

Here are some of the most impactful and notable updates across Google, Bing (which also powers Yahoo! Search), DuckDuckGo in 2020.

1. Google

According to Emily Moxley, Google’s Product Management for Search, Google launched over 4,000 search improvements and new features throughout 2020. Among them:

• Google added the Removals report to Search Console in January, enabling site owners and SEOs to temporarily hide a page from Google Search results. In February, they made it easier to export more data from almost all reports.
• March saw the launch of the com/covid19 website with country or state-based information, safety and prevention tips, and search trends related to COVID-19. Other pandemic-related features rolled out in 2020 include the Exposure Notifications API, an SOS Alerts system, and a slate of new GMB features to help businesses better communicate special hours, temporary closures, and other COVID-19 information to searchers.
• In August, Google confirmed it had made a number of improvements designed to be “as invisible as possible” to the Search Console API.
• In October, the Justice Department sued Google and claimed the search engine is an illegal monopoly. Antitrust accusations are not new to Google, and this case could drag on for years.
• Google announced in October that BERT language understanding systems first introduced in 2019 are now being used in nearly every English-language query.
• The improved Crawl Stats Report came out in November with new features including detailed information on host status and URL examples showing where on-site requests occurred.
• Also in November, Google announced that voice search had become smarter. New language capabilities and the carrying over of context from one voice search to another meant Google could gradually “learn” more about the searcher’s true intent.
• Google announced late in the year that it is “refocusing the Structured Data Testing Tool and migrating it to a new domain serving the schema.org community by April 2021.” Notably, once this transition is complete the tool will no longer check for Google Search rich result types.

Notably, the timeframe for mobile-first indexing was extended from September 2020 to the end of March 2021.

2. Microsoft Bing

Bing attempted to build on its approximately 2.8% global search engine market share by adding a Bing app to Xbox, adding nearby product search to local results, and introducing image-based product search.

Microsoft’s search engine also evolved quickly to provide COVID-19 information and updates to consumers with a tally of local and global cases appearing in search results for any Coronavirus-related query.

In May, Bing gave us a look under the hood at its AI capabilities and experiences, stating that:

“Over the past few years, Bing and Microsoft Research have been developing and deploying large neural network models such as MT-DNN, Unicoder, and UniLM to maximize the search experience for our customers. The best of those learnings are open-sourced into the Microsoft Turing language models. The large-scale, multilingual Natural Language Representation (NLR) model serves as the foundation for several fine-tuned models, each powering a different part of the search experience.”

Examples of AI at scale in Bing include Yes or No summaries to straightforward questions in search, the expansion of intelligent answers to more languages, and a new NLR-based model for understanding complex or ambiguous queries.

3. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo’s intense focus on privacy makes it more difficult to optimize for, as user data is not tracked. Even so, 0.5% of the global search market share (and 1.7% in the US) still makes it one of the world’s top search engines.

Throughout the year, DuckDuckGo added a number of new features and made updates designed to improve the user experience while protecting privacy. In October, DuckDuckGo launched private walking and driving directions powered by Apple’s MapKit JS framework

In October, we saw the punchy small search engine take a direct shot at Google in regards to its antitrust lawsuit. In an open letter, DuckDuckGo pointedly asked,

“So, Google, given that you’ve often said competition is one click away, and you’re aware a complicated process suppresses competition, why does it take fifteen+ clicks to make DuckDuckGo Search or any other alternative the default on Android devices?”

4. Yandex

Yandex, Russia’s largest search engine announced early in 2020 “Vega” as its new algorithm. This included 1,500 enhancements to Yandex Search. Throughout 2020 Yandex continued to add more human elements into its search engine.

Andrey Styskin, head of Yandex Search, stated, “At Yandex, it’s our goal to help consumers and businesses better navigate the online and offline world.  With this new search update, users across the RuNet are helping us do just that”.

According to research from Mikhail Volovich and Olga Yudina of Ashmanov & Partners and reported by Dan Taylor differences in ranking factors between Yandex and Google include;

• Lesser effects of links within Yandex compared to Google
• “On mobile, site speed appears to be more important to Google than Yandex, but in Yandex, the number of Turbo pages has increased greatly (outside of the top 3 results).”
• The research also predicted mobile search will see an increase in both AMP and Turbo pages.

5. Baidu

The leading search engine in China, controls over 74% of searches, and ever since the 2017 release of the ‘Hurricane’ algorithm continues to focus on content quality.

As it continues to crack down on poor quality sites with its 2020 updates its StrongWind algorithm was introduced to control aggregator content from malicious sites.

Baidu SEO 2020 update, the content has become king in the Baidu algorithm. The Baidu spider focuses on enhancing the user experience. Like Google, Baidu has vigorously diversified, and provides dozens of services from maps to cloud storage – and its search engine backs up the whole ecosystem.

SEO trends to watch in 2021

SEOs take heart! Google launched a new blog series in 2020 designed to showcase the value of SEO to businesses. The first post was an overview of how a Korean company used SEO to double its web traffic. While Google has historically shied away from association with the optimization of sites for its search algorithms, it seems SEO is no longer a dirty phrase. Let’s hope this trend continues.

Here are some other areas to watch in 2021 and beyond:

1. Brands adapt to rapidly shifting consumer behavior

The first pandemic experience of our lifetimes has changed the way people search, shop, communicate, and work. Just how long these changes will hold or how consumer behavior will evolve over this next year is a giant question mark on business and marketing plans the world over.

Here’s what we do know: anxiety, stress, and public health concerns drove massive changes in consumer behavior in 2020. We saw dramatic shifts in search interest and conversions, with very different impacts across verticals. And in the absence of historic data to guide marketers through such an event, insights from search data became our closest approximation of real-time voice of the customer.

While we don’t know what 2021 has in store for us, it’s clear that the best place to track consumer behavior changes as they happen is in your search data. Business leaders will be looking to SEOs to bring them these insights in relatable, understandable ways that can be put to work immediately driving intelligent business decisions.

2. Core Web Vitals gain importance

As Google explained its April 2020 Web Vitals explanation, “Core Web Vitals are the subset of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages, should be measured by all site owners, and will be surfaced across all Google tools. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome.”

On its face, Google’s CWV update is a reinforcement of what we already know to be best practices for user experience. If you want to take a deeper dive into the research and methodology driving this update, Defining the Core Web Vitals metrics thresholds by Google software engineer Bryan McQuade is a good read.

Google also promises that the definitions and thresholds of Core Web Vitals will be stable and that marketers will have prior notice of updates, which will have a predictable, annual cadence.

3. Image and visual search

As brands compete for consumers’ attention and as image and visual content optimization continue to gain SERP real estate, new channels are opening up beyond just YouTube. Brands, looking to stand out in 2021 should be utilizing combinations of images and videos to inform and educate customers as they spend more and more time online. Beyond Google niche (non-traditional) vertical optimization opportunities may just be opening up.

Below are two brief examples.

Vimeo

According to Cisco, video will make up 82 percent of all internet traffic in 2021. While YouTube still dominates more and more platforms are opening up, presenting more opportunities to optimize content.

Vimeo, the video-sharing platform originally created by filmmakers is building a large community of creative marketers producing content. Although opportunities to rank are less there are still opportunities for marketers in this niche.

“In the last seven months we’ve welcomed over 30 million new members, seen over 60 million new videos created and uploaded, and powered millions of live events that went digital for the first time — more than the prior 3 years combined,”

Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud.

No doubt COVID-19 has fuelled the growth in demand for more creativity in video production and as IAC (its owner) looks to spin it off as a standalone public company in 2021 time will tell where and if this fits and sits for SEO.

GIPHY

Everyone likes a good image, especially if animated. Facebook (Instagram) owned Giphy is allowing more and more marketers opportunities to make their content engaging. This is especially true with younger generations. A search engine in its own right, optimizing for Giphy presents new opportunities to optimize for intent and rank on their own site.

Now serving more than 7 billion GIFs per day and seen by more than 500 million daily optimizing GIFs on Giphy (and in general) is a great way for SEO to drive awareness and keep people engaged with your website page(s).

For SEOs, standard image optimization best practices can work well on Giphy, but the competition is intense, and optimization nuances exist. For brand marketers (in particular) Giphy and GIFs can be an awareness channel in itself.

4. PPC and SEO converge

In increasingly rich and diverse search results, it is imperative that marketers have a solid grasp on how their paid and organic search strategies work in tandem to achieve the best business results. As the lines between paid and organic continue to blur, it makes less and less sense to have these two channels as distinct departments or teams competing over budget.

Successful search teams will work together more seamlessly in 2021 to monitor both paid and organic results, determining from a more holistic point of view where the brand’s greatest opportunities lie—and which tactic is key to achieving the greatest visibility and conversion from search. Together, paid and organic teams will strategize how to use tools like Dynamic Search Ads and Discovery Campaigns, bidding automation, and AI-driven content optimizations to drive brand awareness and content promotion in both types of results.

5. Brands demand ROI and mastery of martech solutions

2020 provided us “The Great Pause”, literally stopping the world in its tracks. It gave us a chance to slow down, take a breath, and take a critical look at what’s working—and what is not. Even before the pandemic struck, it was clear that stacks cobbled together of point solutions not designed to integrate were problematic, but the full extent of their shortcomings became clear this year.

Consumer behavior changed so rapidly, and completely that real-time insights were elevated from “nice to have” to life or death. Brands that only knew how to rely on the performance of previous months or years found themselves lacking a sense of direction and unable to pivot. Going forward, brands are looking for platform solutions that not only automate but do so intelligently with AI and machine learning. Moreover, they are looking for agile marketers capable of getting the best possible output from these martech solutions.

What does 2021 have in store for the business world? Only time will tell. However, SEOs are among those best-positioned to lead in the face of uncertainty and should expect stakeholders across the organization to look to them this coming year for guidance. This is true both regionally and internally as interest in International SEO rises once again.

Now is the time to ensure you’re set up with the right tools and skills to deliver.

30-second summary:

• If you think optimizing your content for Google is tough, then you‘re going to be amazed by how many factors you‘ll have to consider when optimizing your writing for multiple search engines. 
• Two benefits of doing so can be seen in local SEO and voice search.
• UK Linkology’s Content Marketing Manager, Hannah Stevenson walks you through the complex process to understand and implement how you can optimize content for search engines beyond Google – Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ask.com, and more.

Optimizing your content for just one search engine can be a challenge, as we‘ve still got no idea what Google expects. 

There is a range of different tools out there designed to help, but they‘re all merely making educated guesses. To use them effectively, you need to be assessing what they tell you and, where possible, using more than one metric to evaluate your site‘s success and boost its rankings. 

If you think optimizing your content for Google is tough, then you‘re going to be amazed by how many factors you‘ll have to consider when optimizing your writing for multiple search engines.  

Read on to find out why it‘s important that you don‘t overlook alternative search engines and how you can include them in your optimization process.  

Why you need to optimize content for a range of search engines 

Google has the largest market share of any search engine in the world, so, understandably, most writers and SEOs focus on optimizing for it. 

However, there are a wide variety of alternative search engines out there. Bing, Microsoft‘s search engine offering, has 5.53% of this market. This might seem like a small percentage, but when you consider that the digital population around the world is in the billions, it is still a significant number of users that you‘re overlooking by only optimizing your content for Google. 

A percentage of users of Bing will have it set as their prefered search tool due to the browser or device they are using. Microsoft favours its own tools, which is why Bing is the default search engine on Windows phones, tablets and computers.  

Some developers have deals to make certain search engines their default. Many of these deals involve Google, but in some cases, the titan of the search engine market is usurped.  

For example, AOL chose Bing over Google in 2015, meaning that Bing is the default engine on AOL browsers. While this might not seem significant, many users will not bother to change their settings, and simply use the default search engine, meaning if this option is not Google, then other search engines will rise in popularity.  

Additionally, some smaller search engines target specific demographics, such as Ecosia, which is marketed at environmentally-conscious users and donates money towards planting trees with every search that users make.  

For users who are concerned about privacy and data storage, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that promises not to store information and block out hidden tracking software.  

As such, if you are targeting these specific demographics, then you need to make sure that you optimize your content for these tools.  

Research the search engines on the market 

Before you start optimizing your content, you need to check out the search engines on offer and work out which ones are the most relevant to your website.  

Some of the key search engines on the market, not including Google, are: 

• Bing: As mentioned earlier, Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, which has a strong market share.  
• Yahoo!: Powered by Bing, Yahoo! Uses the same technology, but is a different platform, meaning that you can optimize for this solution using the same techniques you use for Bing.  
• Ecosia: An eco-friendly search engine that promotes itself by offering to donate money towards tree planting efforts for every search users make on its platform.  
• DuckDuckGo: A privacy-focused search engine that does not track user data, making it harder to optimize for and less-informative than other tools.  
• Qwant: Another search engine that’s dedicated to privacy, Qwant has it’s own indexing engine and doesn’t track user activity.  
• Ask.com: Using a question and answer format, Ask.com providers users with answers to any queries they may have by showing them relevant pages and content.  

Look beyond Google Analytics 

The first step towards to optimize content for alternative search engines is to find new sources of traffic information.

Most webmasters use Google Analytics to review their traffic and site information, but this platform only shows clicks from Google searches. 

If you want to find out where you‘re getting all of your page visits from, then you‘ll need to find alternative ways to review your traffic.  

Analytics tools such as SEMrush, SimilarWeb and Ahrefs all show you where your traffic is coming from, as well as offering a wide range of additional tools such as keyword searches and top page analysis. As such, they‘re definitely worth investing in if you want to boost your site, both on Google and a range of other search engines.   

Follow them on social media to stay updated 

One of the easiest ways you can learn about the latest developments in the way these alternative search engines operate, and how you can optimize content around them is to stay updated.  

As such, you should follow them on social media and sign up to their newsletters to read the latest developments and advice that they‘re offering to users and content creators.  

Keeping tabs on so many different search engines can be a challenge, particularly if you‘re trying to optimize your content around several different tools.  

You‘ll be able to get all of the updates as and when they‘re released. You‘ll also receive expert commentary on what these developments mean for you and your content.  

Local SEO benefits some alternative search engines

Some search engines offer tailored local insight, meaning that you can use local SEO practices to target these platforms. 

For example, Bing offers Bing Places, a directory of local companies, and is committed to offering users search results tailored around their location.  

As Yahoo! is powered by Bing, boosting your reach on one platform will translate to growth on the other.  

Bing‘s dedication to sharing local search results means that, if you use local search terms in your content, you will be more likely to rank on this platform.  

Flash is Bing‘s favourite

Bing also has technical preferences, with a focus on Flash and Silverlight based applications: 

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), such as Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Flash Player, can improve the aesthetic appearance or the functional ability of a site for end-users. However, the way these technologies are typically implemented often causes problems with the ability of search engine bots to crawl and fetch any meaningful data from the site. 

Sites extensively employing JavaScript and AJAX technologies can also cause the same problems for search. This is because search bots are primarily readers of the text. It is much more difficult to parse and derive indexable, relevant content from graphic and multimedia content. As a result, sites who implement these technologies without regard to search bot accessibility often unexpectedly see their search rankings drop off (from the search bot perspective, the site simply has little-to-no indexable content available, which adversely affects its relevance to the site’s main theme).

As such, you need to try to move your site onto RIAs where possible and optimize the meta tags and description tags to help you achieve strong results on Bing.  

Ask.com is optimized in a similar way to voice search

Voice search is one of the fastest-growing trends in the SEO market currently, with so many consumers now turning to their smart devices and virtual assistants to give them the information they need. 

When optimizing content for voice search, the key is to answer questions, as the majority of verbal searches are questions. 

This is because voice search queries use natural voice commands, as users are speaking rather than typing. Google has identified that almost 70% of searches on Google Assistant are performed in natural language, rather than the keywords that you often find in written searches.  

It‘s more natural to ask a question than it is to yell keywords towards your device. As such, optimizing your content for voice search involves including questions and providing the answers.  

Creating content with question and answers in it not only helps you to boost your voice search results, but also helps you to optimize your content for Ask.com. 

As Ask.com focuses on providing users with the answers to questions, by also focusing on this format, you can kill two birds with one stone and optimize your writing for both Ask.com and voice search.  

Never sacrifice quality and relevance

The key to search engine visibility and increased traffic will always be quality and relevance. No matter what tools you use and what search engines you choose to target, you should always focus on creating readable content that grabs your reader‘s attention.  

Always make sure that your content is thoroughly proofread and that you haven‘t stuffed too many keywords into obscure positions. If you start every sentence with your target keywords, then search engines will pick up on this and may penalize your site.  

A Google penalty is a serious issue, but a penalty from any other search engine can also cause you major problems.  

Tools such as Grammarly or Hemingway Editor can help with readability, while SEO Surfer can help you understand keyword density and content layout. It should be mentioned that SEO Surfer takes much of its data from Google, but the tool can be useful for spreading out your keywords to help boost your rankings in a variety of search engines.  

Conclusion  

At the end of the day, content remains king in the SEO market. Creating quality content needs to remain your key focus, with optimizing it and getting it in front of your target audience your second priority.  

As with any business decision, when you‘re optimizing your content, you should try to spread your risk. Aim to create content that is valuable not only for Google but a range of other search engines too.   

Hannah Stevenson is the Content Marketing Manager at UK Linkology. 

You might have heard of DuckDuckGo in the past. Our first long post about it was back in 2016 with Rebecca Sentance trying out the new search engine for a week.

Three years later, many things have changed. More users are losing trust in big tech companies and privacy and security are more important than ever. How does DuckDuckGo fit in this change?

And how is the experience of switching into a new search engine nowadays?

DuckDuckGo in numbers

Over the last few months, DuckDuckGo has seen increased media coverage. Its growing stats among a growing conversation around online privacy make it more relevant than ever.

There are more than 30 million searches happening on DuckDuckGo every day. Its data indicates a constant growth. It’s currently the fourth largest search engine in the U.S. counting more than 1 billion searches every month all over the world.

Google is holding the reins of the market share with 88.5% of it, Bing is following with 6.12%, Yahoo! is third with 4.11% and DuckDuckGo is forthwith 0.99% of the market share.

It clearly has a long way to go to stand out as a serious competitor in the market share. However, it has already paved the way in a new kind of search engine that is serious about security and privacy. In fact, its mission is to set a new standard of trust online.

The search engine that doesn’t track you

One of the first things you notice when visiting DuckDuckGo, except for the search box, is the subheading “the search engine that doesn’t track you”.

DuckDuckGo was built as an alternative to Google and the big search engines that use tracking data to improve personalization. DuckDuckGo reassures its users that they don’t store their personal information. They don’t collect or share personal data. They are not storing your search history, which means that they are not able to sell this data to advertisers. Moreover, there’s no tracking in the private browsing mode, which sounds encouraging for everyone who is interested in a search engine that won’t track every single search.

What’s interesting is that DuckDuckGo wants to prove that they take privacy seriously. A click on their menu button at the homepage on ‘privacy simplified’ allows you to:

• Protect your data on every device
• Subscribe to their Privacy Crash Course to improve your understanding of online privacy
• Protect your devices by reading privacy guides
• Find out more about the importance of reduced tracking

Just recently, Google announced an expanded number of default search engines for users including DuckDuckGo for the first time. This was certainly a small win for the DuckDuckGo and also for people who want to focus on private searches.

It’s not surprising that more users are interested in learning more about their online privacy.

[Screenshot from DuckDuckGo’s traffic page.]

A closer look at DuckDuckGo’s stats indicates this growing interest in security and privacy. DuckDuckGo reached 10 million searches in one day back in 2015. It managed to reach 20 million searches in October 2018. In April 2019 it counts 38 million searches.

Making the most of DuckDuckGo

I’ve decided to try out DuckDuckGo after many years of using Google. The focus on online privacy along with the growing number of people switching to DuckDuckGo made it an intriguing choice.

The first impression seemed familiar. Simplicity and a minimal interface made the transition easy.

The fact that your searches are not personalized means that everyone can access the same results in a similar search. This seems to be a relief in the common pattern of the online filter bubbles that we’re used to be part of.

Another relief was the lack of endless ads before the actual search results. I’ve been used to the series of ads before the actual search results and the science of PPC from a professional perspective, but it was still a nice experience to find the direct results of my query. There was only one ad at the top of the search results, which I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a similar limit to my Google results.

In addition to these, you can also save time from your searches by making the most of DuckDuckGo’s bangs. Bangs are shortcuts that allow you to search results on other sites. If you want to search for “SEO” on Search Engine Watch and you’re actually on DuckDuckGo’s homepage, all you need to do is to type ‘!searchenginewatch seo’

There are currently more than 12k bangs so you can search any of the big sites without visiting them in a different tab.

Finding the best search results — not everything is perfect

I must admit that the lack of personalization has its pros and cons. It is obviously reassuring to feel that you’re in control of your own data. However, you should also be prepared for the additional queries you might need to find the best results.

Forget queries like “cinemas near me” and “what’s playing”

The search results will be the same for everyone all over the world without detailed queries that could possibly help you get more personalized results.

Moreover, the actual search cannot compete with Google’s sophisticated search. After years of serving as the biggest search engine, there is a learning of semantics that leads to way better results compared to all other search engines.

This shouldn’t be a surprise and it should be clear when you’re jumping into DuckDuckGo that not everything will be the same.

There will also be an initial phase of learning the ropes of a new search experience, which is expected in every new tool and site.

Are these reasons enough to abandon DuckDuckGo? Not yet. It’s good to understand that it won’t replace Google anytime soon but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t deserve a chance, especially if you’re serious about your online privacy when searching. I’ll personally give it a go knowing that if I can’t find a specific result, I can still use Google. I also enjoy their curated stories around privacy on their Twitter feed so it was an easy decision to follow them and stay up-to-date.

The choice is yours

The online world is changing. And we’re facing with numerous dilemmas when it comes to staying loyal to the big tech companies. As more data breaches and scandals show up, it’s up to us to decide whether we want to keep personalization or not.

There’s no right or wrong answer.

Google is certainly enjoying the success of the big search giant with a large index and search features that keep us hooked with along the numerous services we use on a daily basis. However, it’s refreshing to feel that we still have alternative options. Whether we use them or not, it’s up to us.

What’s important is to be conscious of your decision and your online privacy. The more informed we are, the better our online experience.

Today, I want to turn my attention to Mojeek.

This UK-based search engine which is aiming itself at web users who want a non-creepy search engine in the vein of DuckDuckGo and Startpage, as well as a greener option akin to Ecosia.

A couple weeks ago, Marc and Finn from Mojeek hosted a Reddit AMA about their project. The response was massive.

The debate about technical choices and hurdles, the ethics of search, as well as the value of fledgling engines in the era of Google’s dominance raged on for another 48 hours after the initial livechat.

Here are some of my takeaways from that and from my own deep dive into the world of Mojeek.

How is Mojeek different?

The elevator pitch for Mojeek is ‘Independent and unbiased search results with no user tracking.’

The engine has been building its own index from scratch since 2006 which currently stands at around 2.3 billion pages with the aim of passing 4 billion by the end of 2019.

This unique index is the key differentiator between Mojeek and its competitors.

While DuckDuckGo depends in part on ad results from the Bing-Yahoo network and Startpage delivers untracked results from Google, Mojeek is seeking to ensure true independence from the corporate names by doing everything itself. In doing so they are seeking to eliminate bias in the SERPs and to be wholly trustworthy in regards to user privacy.

On top of that, Mojeek is also proud of its environmental credentials. As the service states on its homepage, its servers are hosted at ‘the UK’s greenest data center, Custodian.’

Crawler-based versus metasearch

From the outset, we can see that Mojeek is promising a lot. To really be viewed as an alternative, its founders have set themselves the monumental task of crawling the web themselves, something Google has been doing since 1997.

Its 2.3 billion page index can’t really compete with the feted ‘hundreds of billions of webpages’ Google crawls. But there’s something quite admirable about the dedication to crawler-based search while other competitors opt for the metasearch route, i.e. paying to use information from other, often more-established, crawlers to bolster results in the SERPs.

Mojeek might have its work cut out in ever matching the size of an index that Google and the metasearch engines have access to. But for users, who do want a truly different lens through which to view the web, its own crawler-based service is the only real option to them.

Unbiased results. Is this possible?

The notion of unbiased results in search is an interesting one and was a big talking point in Mojeek’s recent AMA.

Things would be quite simple if Mojeek were taking bias (and their own lack of it) as related to user-tracking and how our past activity affects the SERPs we see at Google et al.

But for Marc and Finn, bias is a lot more than simply eliminating the echo chamber, as the AMA reflects, “It means we would never intentionally manipulate our results to show any particular point of view. We don‘t believe a search engine should have an agenda, whether political or otherwise and returning as relevant but opposing views should be a goal.”

So, Mojeek is fundamentally opposed to censorship or filtering results in the SERPs on political grounds. We can also infer that they would not give preferential visibility to advertisers nor to their own products/affiliates (as we might assume from an engine with a more capitalist agenda).

These are great values. But as some commenters point out, completely unbiased results in search is extremely difficult to achieve. Algorithms always have some bias, in practice.

And as we have seen with criticism leveled at Google when CEO Sundar Pichai answered to Congress last December – the very make-up of the staff working at Mojeek (including their age, race, gender) can lead to some biases. To some users, these may be quite innocuous. To others, not so.

How can we be sure of absolute privacy/unbiased results if we don’t know who is investing in Mojeek?

There is also a slight disconnect between Mojeek’s purported dedication to privacy/unbiased results and the lack of transparency about who is investing in the search engine.

While the company stresses that their backers are private, non-institutional and not known tech investors, it is clear from the AMA that a number of potential users do not trust a business who can’t disclose this. While some commenters ignored this point, others were skeptical that further investment in Mojeek down the line wouldn’t see some of its core values be eroded.

Challenging Google’s monopoly, or finding another niche?

One of Mojeek’s best virtues is that it is an alternative crawler to Google. This challenge to Google’s monopoly did seem to win over some visitors to the AMA who are excited about the prospect of there being another destination for search users which offers a different view of the web.

There were salient suggestions that Mojeek might do well to make more of offering a niche search service, perhaps by only indexing sites which meet certain privacy standards themselves (although, of course, the question of bias rears its head again here). Of course, Mojeek will only really succeed at challenging Google’s monopoly if it can offer a comparable service or offer something Google doesn’t.

Emotional search

Mojeek does actually have a niche type of search that they are testing in beta alongside emotion computing business EMRAYS.

The ‘search by emotion’ function gives users the option to input search terms to acquire results from pages which match that sentiment.

It works well, especially for broad terms. A search for ‘panda’ via the love emotion sees results such as cute panda pics and the San Diego Zoo Panda Cam. Click for angry results, however, and you see top pages referring to news stories about panda meat and mistreatment.

This functionality highlights something quite key about the usefulness of Mojeek. While it seeks to be an alternative, it doesn’t store our past searches, and boasts of unbiased results, a basic search via its homepage often returns results not dissimilar to what we would find with a Google search.

This is especially true if I search, for instance, for my hometown ‘Plymouth’. The first result is a Google-style knowledge panel with information from Wikipedia.

For certain searches, then, it is easy to see how difficult a task Mojeek has for providing a true alternative to Google while still offering relevant results. The ‘search by emotion’ function, however, does show that search results can be organized in a different way or to return to a phrase I used earlier, the web can be viewed through a different lens.

I wonder about the potential of a search engine that sets itself apart as an emotional engine or, indeed, offers a more utopian view of the world wide web. I’m unsure how practical this would be.

But I think there’s something to be said for wanting to view the web via an engine which values empathy, humanity, positivity, love, especially during an era of flamebait, trolling, online negativity, divisive content.

A search engine with its own independent crawler and no-tracking ethos would be well placed for such an experiment. Even if it does mean admitting that a bit of bias in search can be useful.

Luke Richards is a Search Engine Watch columnist.

Read on for my hotlist of 12 alternatives to ‘The Big G’. As you’ll see, there’s been some changes in the alternative search world since my colleague Christopher Ratcliff wrote his comprehensive listicle back in early 2014. Since then, some have dropped off the map and others have been usurped in usefulness by Google’s increasingly rich functionality, and are not featured here.

1. Bing

Globally, Bing is still the second biggest search engine after Google and it also still powers the third biggest, Yahoo!.

With its clean white background, blue links, and green URLs, it sure looks familiar although it also features a few things that sets it apart. For example its ‘Rewards’ scheme gives you points when you shop or search via the service that can then be used to go towards buying things like apps and movies.

Bing also has a ‘My Saves’ function acting as a bookmark tool. It also boasts some prominent – and handy – filters for results by date, language, and region.

2. Baidu

If you have an interest in digital in Asia, you need to know about Baidu.

Baidu is the search engine of choice for around 77% of China’s internet market. Though its dominance can be seen to fluctuate – thanks to fierce competition from other domestic rivals such as Shenma and Haosou.

Like Bing, you have to look closely at Baidu to see many differences between it and Google (other than it being in Mandarin). It is similar aesthetically, has a reliance on ads, and is also making moves to incorporate more rich features in the SERPs.

On the flipside though, the service is noted for its censorship of certain images and blocking of pro-democracy websites – to the extent that might seem quite extreme to searchers who are used to Google.

3. Yandex

Yandex is to Russia as Baidu is to China. More than 53% of Russian search engine users favour Yandex. It also has a presence in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Belarus.

The search engine is available in English and Cyrillic and incorporates social logins. And if users choose to use Yandex Disk – its cloud storage service – it is easy to search your files right from the search bar.

4. Ecosia

As more of our computing moves into the cloud, users are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental impact of day to day digital activities.

Googling is – perhaps surprisingly for such a quick innocuous activity – a formidable Co2 producer.

Launched in 2009, Ecosia is a Co2-neutral alternative. With every search made, the social business uses the revenue generated to go towards its tree-planting scheme. On average, 45 searches are needed to make a single tree.

Much of the engine itself is powered by Bing.

5. DuckDuckGo

We have covered DuckDuckGo extensively in the past and the engine is still going strong.

Its USP is simple: it doesn’t collect, store, or pass on any personal information about its users. It’s a logical choice if you want a search experience which is free from ad targeting and if potential data storage about your search activities makes you feel uneasy.

While the service doesn’t target users with ads or suggestions based on search history, it is not free from ads altogether. The ads it does deliver are syndicated via Bing.

6. StartPage

Like DuckDuckGo, StartPage was founded with strict user Privacy as its USP. Again, it doesn’t track and store your data, and it doesn’t target ads based on your behaviors.

The engine is powered by Google and does use ads (delivered by Google) to generate revenue. Each search result is also delivered with a ‘Proxy’ option which allows users to browse the following site anonymously.

7. Twitter

I’ve included Twitter because I think its search functionality can be useful in certain situations.

For instance, during a breaking news event, tweets from people in the vicinity are likely to be the quickest up-to-the-second updates of what’s going on before initial news sites and Google’s algorithms catch up.

You can see this ‘First For News’ authority being something the service is increasingly exploring. Any search on Twitter will lead to a filtered ‘News’ tab initially, but users can easily click over to the ‘Latest’ tab to see updates come in from anyone using that search term second by second.

8. CC Search

CC Search is a great tool for finding copyright-free content.

Whether you want an image to use on a blog post, a piece of music to add to a video, or you just want a piece of media to remix – it is a really h engine.

The site works by drawing in search results from existing platforms – such as Flickr, or Soundcloud – which have been tagged as Creative Commons material.

9. Internet Archive

Continuing in the spirit of accessible content, Internet Archive (often known by its URL, archive.org) is a vast collection of documented material – including music, books, video, educational texts, and more.

It is also home to the endlessly fascinating Wayback Machine, a tool which has been taking snapshots of the internet since the 90s.

10. Wiki.com

You are probably all familiar with Wikipedia but there are thousands of other wikis which are an amazing resource on a range of topics – from politics to pop culture.

Wiki.com is a handy search engine which draws in content from wikis only if you want community-led encyclopedic know-how about something (aside from Wikipedia).

11. Boardreader

Boardreader is a search engine which pulls in results from forums and message boards.

It’s a convenient tool if you’re searching for content written by everyday users about a topic, but you aren’t necessarily familiar enough with the niche to know the best forum or board to visit from the outset.

12. Slideshare

Slideshare, now hosted by LinkedIn, is a great tool for searching documented slideshow presentations, as well as PDFs and eBooks.

If you’re tasked with needing to do a presentation yourself, or you need information about a topic that is likely to have seen a presentation made for it in the past, Slideshare is a valuable repository. You can save slides you might need to refer to later and download entire slideshows direct from the platform.

Each new search engine takes a slightly different approach to searching the web, but there is one trait that many of the recent ones have in common: private, secure searching.

Oscobo, WhaleSlide, Gyffu and GoodGopher are just some of the non-tracking, private and secure search engines that have been launched in the last two or three years, joining more well-established engines like StartPage, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek and Privatelee.

Is this cluster of private search engines just a passing fad, or is it indicative of an increasing trend among users towards secure, private search? And if so, what does this mean for more mainstream search engines like the all-seeing Google?

I spoke to leading figures at three private search engines, both new and established – Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, Robert Beens, CEO of StartPage, and Robert Perin, co-founder and Managing Director of Oscobo – to find out why they thought more and more people could be turning to private search, and what the ramifications are for the wider industry.

Why launch a private search engine?

All three search engines whose leaders I spoke to came to the industry at very different times: StartPage was originally founded as Ixquick in 1998, and made the transition to private search in 2006; DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008; and Oscobo officially launched at the beginning of 2016.

For StartPage, the decision to become a private search engine was taken when the company noticed the sheer amounts of user data that it was accumulating and not using, and made a conscious decision to get rid of it.

For Beens, who led the initiative for StartPage to become a private search engine, it was a way for StartPage to distinguish itself in an already competitive industry, and the business case for this decision outweighed the benefits of any potential income from selling user data.

“From a business perspective, [monetizing our users’ data] makes absolutely zero sense. The only thing that sets us apart from bigger search that do monetize people’s user behavior is the fact we don’t. That’s what attracts people to us. It’s true that the revenue we make on our ads is far less than what others tend to make – so be it. It’s what makes us unique.”

Beens couldn’t have known for sure, as early as 2006, whether his gamble on a private search model was going to pay off in the long run, but he was looking for a point of distinction from Google, which was already dominant by then. “I thought that it would give us a differentiator in a difficult market at the moment. It’ll make us stand out. I’m proud of doing that.”

Beens believes that Google, along with most tech companies, has a “blind spot” when it comes to privacy – providing an opening for other search engines to compete in spite of Google’s attractive search product. His decision also gave StartPage the prestigious title of being the first search engine in the world to offer private search.

Notoriously pro-privacy search engine DuckDuckGo was also created because founder Gabriel Weinberg was looking to improve on what Google was doing, though he didn’t initially set out to create a company around his search tool. He told Forbes in an interview that he “backed into” search – “I didn’t think about it from a business perspective at the time.”

Now, however, DuckDuckGo is keen to tout the fact that it doesn’t track its users as a key selling point, along with what it believes is a cleaner, more fun design and a better overall search experience.

Robert Perin, meanwhile, was aware when he launched Oscobo in 2016 that there were already other private search options out there for people to use. Oscobo therefore decided to differentiate itself by going local – focusing initially on a UK audience, to distinguish itself from US-centric search engines like DuckDuckGo – before broadening its approach to include other countries.

A former employee at BlackBerry, Perin was inspired to develop a private search engine when he realized just how much technology was encroaching onto our everyday lives, particularly with the advent of mobile.

“Technology is creeping into our lifestyles – we carry our mobile phones around with us everywhere we go. The next step is the Internet of Things – you look at remotely-controlled heating and lighting, which can be used to analyze someone’s electricity consumption, but also to know what time they’re going home. If that data is being shared with everyone, it can be manipulated to any degree.

“Search has gone from being a relatively harmless tool to being an almighty and powerful tool. It’s the starting point for the internet. And as technology creeps into our homes and our lives, we have to hold back how much data is being handled.”

Why are people using private search?

Do people use private search purely because of concerns about data privacy? Edward Snowden’s NSA spying revelations are often pointed to as a watershed moment for people wanting to switch to private search engines. But while this is undoubtedly a significant driving factor, there is a variety of other reasons why people would opt to search privately.

DuckDuckGo’s Gabriel Weinberg points out that using a search engine which doesn’t tailor its results to the user can allow them to break out of the “filter bubble” that many users of mainstream search engines are trapped in.

“Use of a private search engine enables you to escape the “filter bubble,” where results are filtered based on what a search engine thinks it knows about you, such as your political ideologies,” he told Search Engine Watch.

“This echo chamber is extremely pernicious in a search context where you expect to receive unbiased information. Unfortunately, with other [non-private] search engines, that’s not the case.”

Robert Perin believes that tech-savvy users who know about the scope of Google’s data collection use private search to escape ‘Big Brother’, or because of ethical concerns about the amount of data being stored, even if they’re not sure how it’s being used.

Image by Patrick Barry, available via CC BY-SA 2.0

The average, non-technical person, however, is more likely to be persuaded by an argument such as dynamic pricing – in which pricing levels are adjusted based on a user’s perceived ability to pay. The prospect of unlimited choice, he says, is also a powerful one – the idea that your search results won’t be limited based on decisions that you happen to have made in the past.

“If you went to a restaurant and you were handed a menu with nothing but steaks on it, because last time you ate a steak, therefore they presume you just want a steak – you’d be kind of annoyed by that!” Perin laughs.

“And with the larger search engines, because they’re doing profiling on you, you’ll just get shown what they think you want, and also what is more beneficial to them that you click on. So it is a limited choice, in that sense.”

Is this a trend that’s growing, as evidenced by the number of new search engines that allow users to search privately?

“Absolutely,” says Robert Beens of StartPage. “There are all sorts of search engines jumping on the bandwagon, who want to get a share of that [private search] market – it’s a market that’s definitely growing.

“We’re not against it – competition is always good.”

“Privacy is both mainstream and growing fast,” agrees Gabriel Weinberg, pointing to the increasing traffic numbers on DuckDuckGo as evidence of this trend in action. DuckDuckGo passed the 10 million searches per day milestone in 2015, and is closing in on the 20 million mark, with an average of around 19 million searches daily in December 2017.

“Most people still aren’t aware there is a search engine out there that doesn’t track them, though as the word continues to get out, usage of DuckDuckGo continues to increase,” says Weinberg.

“The amount of people who care about their data privacy is by no means a small number and this group is certainly not niche. 24% of US adults currently are concerned enough about their online privacy to take significant actions to try to protect it.”

DuckDuckGo’s growing traffic over time

The cost of convenience

But there’s a trade-off between the privacy and security of using private search engines and the convenience and accuracy which come from using a search engine that learns from your data and personal preferences.

Users of mainstream search engines have become accustomed to this level of uncanny, ‘mind-reading’ accuracy, and while it might be unsettling at times, they’re still unwilling to give it up even for the sake of data privacy. I asked my interviewees whether private search engines that don’t track user data can provide the same level of tailored searching as those who do.

“Most of the personalization that people want from a search engine is actually localization, like getting local weather or restaurant info,” says Gabriel Weinberg.

“We can provide those results without tracking our users because approximate location information is sent automatically with the search request, which we can use to give you relevant answers, and then immediately throw that information away without ever storing it.

“We believe you can switch to DuckDuckGo and protect your data without compromising on results.”

Oscobo’s Robert Perin admits that users might have to work a little harder to get the results they want when using a private search engine, but that ultimately, the differences aren’t huge.

“We give algorithmic results, based on just the words that you typed in,” he says.

“Searching for ‘cheap mobile phone’ doesn’t say, ‘Oh! He likes Apple – only show him the Apple ones.’ It’s going by what you’ve written. If you do want to see Apple phones, then you’ll need to type in ‘cheap iPhones’. It’s a little less intuitive, perhaps, than what we’re used to – but how much harder do you really have to work?”

“It’s a question of habits and convenience. How much of a hassle is it to have to retype ‘Hilton hotel Paris’ instead of typing ‘H-i-l’ and having the search completed for you? Is that a massive, massive benefit that’s worth selling your identity for?

“And also, what’s the cost? I think when people realize what the cost of convenience is, then they change.”

Robert Beens of StartPage agrees that once people become aware of the extent of the data tracking that takes place online, they are likely to want to change their habits.

“If you give me five minutes to talk to people, I can convince them to use a private search engine.

“But the personal data market exists below the surface – no-one knows about it, and it takes a fairly technical level of understanding to know what’s going on. So it takes education and awareness of the facts behind data tracking, and then people can make a conscious choice to use one or the other.”

What does this mean for Google and SEO?

If there is indeed a steadily snowballing trend towards the use of private search engines, is this going to impact on mainstream, user-tracking search engines like Google and Bing further down the line?  And what about SEO? Do SEOs need to start worrying about optimizing for private search engines?

Well, no. While the approach that DuckDuckGo, StartPage, Oscobo and others take to data privacy is different to Google and Bing, the search technology that underpins them is often the same as those used by mainstream search engines. Robert Perin refers to Oscobo as a “Bing/Yahoo feed”, while StartPage gets its results from Google.

DuckDuckGo draws its search results, particularly Instant Answers, from a wider range of sources including Wikipedia and DuckDuckBot (its crawler); but it also has an agreement in place with Bing, Yahoo and Yandex in which these search engines provide results without any user data being exchanged.

Private search engines see this as an opportunity to provide users with the best of both worlds – the accuracy of more advanced search technology, with the anonymity and security of private searching.

As for repercussions for Google, Perin is skeptical about whether a trend towards private search will make a difference to Google, which is unlikely to do anything meaningful to give up the reams of user data on which it relies for so much of its revenue. (According to Investopedia, about 90% of Google’s entire income stems from advertising).

 Source: Statista

“Ultimately, I think they’ll do everything they can to keep as much data as they can, because that’s where the value is.”

Perin emphasizes that Oscobo isn’t looking to disrupt mainstream search engines with what it does. “Our aim wouldn’t be to shake [Google] up; it’s to give people an alternative.”

Robert Beens echoes this, stating, “The choice is free. If people want an alternative, we want to be there with the best product that we can have.”

The first list below contains the most popular search engines currently available, ordered by most to least popular in the US. The ranking is according to eBiz, it’s in order of estimated unique monthly visitors and is accurate as of August 2016.

The second list is a global overview of most popular search engines, according to Net Market Share, which is ranked in order of market share and is again accurate as of August 2016.

As opposed to our previous list of search engine alternatives to Google, this list will concentrate purely on informational searches rather than say… Gifs or copyright free images.

US

1) Google

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 1.6 billion
Alexa Rank: 1

Why should you use it?

With 72.48% of the world’s market share of search, as a marketer you don’t really have a choice not to use it for both paid and organic reach.

As an every day user, for all of our cynicism and occasionally flippant references to The Circle, you have to admit Google is utterly indispensable in your every day life. For every interference (the constant curtailing of organic results) there are 10 triumphs… Google Maps, Gmail, the terrifying relevance of Knowledge Graph, the killing of payday loan ads, AMP…

Where the heck would we all be without the… yes, I’m going to say it… search giant.

2) Bing

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 400 million
Alexa Rank: 22

Why should you use it?

As I said in earlier in the year in the aforementioned ‘alternatives to Google’ post, there are some great reasons to choose Bing:

• Bing’s video search is significantly better than Google’s.
• Bing often gives twice as many autocomplete suggestions than Google does.
• Bing has a great linkfromdomain:[site name] feature that highlights the best ranked outgoing links from that site, helping you figure out which other sites your chosen site links to the most.

3) Yahoo

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 300 million
Alexa Rank: n/a

Why should you use it?

Well that’s all a but up in the air at the moment, as Verizon has just purchased Yahoo for $4.8 billion dollars and is planning on merging it with AoL.

Yahoo will continue to operate independently pending regulatory approval of the deal, which is expected to be completed by early 2017. After this, all of Yahoo’s news, finance and sports platforms will be added to AOL’s media assets, which include The Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

4) Ask

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 245 million
Alexa Rank: 31

Why should you use it?

Despite Google’s determination to be the ultimate font of all knowledge on its own SERP, Ask is still good for specific question related searches, with results centring on Q&A related matches.

And hey, sometimes it’s nice to get help from a butler.

5) Aol Search

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 125 million
Alexa Rank: n/a

Why should you use it?

As mentioned above, the AOL you know and possibly love may become a different beast once Verizon Communications merges it with Yahoo.

Let’s remember simpler times…

6) Wow

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 100 million
Alexa Rank: 767

Why should you use it?

Because it works more like a news site then a search engine, which is handy if you want everything in one place. There is a strong lean towards news and celebrity based articles rather than pure Wikipedia-style information, but the handy links to related social channels and wiki pages are useful.

7) WebCrawler

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 65 million
Alexa Rank: 674

Why should you use it?

WebCrawler has a far clearer delineation between paid search ads and organic results. It also seems to feature far more natural ’blue links’ than Google.

8) MyWebSearch

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 60 million
Alexa Rank: 405

Why should you use it?

Uh… don’t.

According to the Malware Wikia, MyWebSearch is a spyware and search toolbar program that allows the user to query various popular search engines and comes bundled with an exhausting suite of ‘goodies’ such as such as Smiley Central, Webfetti, Cursor Mania, My Mail Stationary, My Mail Signature, My Mail Stamps, FunBuddyIcons… the fun goes on and on.

Most damningly of all though, Malware Wikia reports that despite it not carrying any malware attributes, an independent repair lab has classified the toolbar as a nuisance because of “slowdowns in return for features that are already built into many modern web browsers.”

9) Infospace

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 24 million
Alexa Rank: 2,110

Why should you use it?

You may be using it already… InfoSpace is a “provider of white label search and monetization solutions” and it also operates its own branded search sites, including the meta search engine Dogpile, as well as Zoo.com and WebCrawler (as mentioned above.)

10) Info.com

Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors: 13.5 million
Alexa Rank: 1,938

Why should you use it?

Info.com aggregates results from the indexed web AND social media channels. It monitors real-time social conversations and according to them, it delivers “newsworthy, trending, and popular results before they hit the indexed web.” These streams are classified into structured topics which provides additional context and insight.

Bonus: 11) DuckDuckGo

Honourable mention to DuckDuckGo, the new kid on the block that doesn’t store your personal information, which has managed to accrue 13 million unique monthly visitors and is currently the 11th most popular search engine in the US.

Worldwide

Here’s the marketshare worldwide for search engines…

1) Google – 72.48%
2) Bing – 10.39%
3) Yahoo – 7.78%
4) Baidu – 7.14%
5) Ask – 0.22%
6) AOL – 0.15%
7) Excite – 0.01%

The Internet is often cast as the great democratizer, and Google its noble gate-keeper. There’s no doubt that search engines help us easily navigate the web, but we have to remember that Google is a corporation, not a public service.

Our faith in its wisdom and guidance is based on little more than a carefully planned PR scheme. Behind that curtain, few of us really have any idea what’s going on. That kind of blind trust may be dangerous for content creators and consumers alike, both in terms of what we see and what we get.

In a recent column for U.S. News & World Report, artificial intelligence expert Dr. Robert Epstein detailed 10 different ways Google uses blacklists to censor the Internet. Some of them seem perfectly within reason – noble, even: banning weapons sales through its shopping service, for instance, or blocking payday loan sharks from AdWords.

Few are going to argue with these measures. In fact, it’s nice to see a little corporate responsibility every once in awhile.

At the same time, though, how can we know when and where to draw the line? At what point does “corporate responsibility” become a catch-all phrase for “Google does what Google wants”?

The point Epstein makes is that with virtually every case of good Samaritan censorship practiced by the “do no evil” company, similar tactics have been used to justify some pretty blatant power grabs or downright bullying.

When media sources in Spain began demanding that aggregators pay fees for content, for example, Google News simply pulled out of the country altogether, and Spanish-based digital news sources have taken a serious hit since.

Consider too, the case of E-Ventures Worldwide, an SEO service website that had all 365 pages of its site blacklisted from search engine results because Google deemed them “pure spam.”

True, these revelations are not shocking for people who deal in SEO. Our line of work more or less entails tracking and following every algorithm-scented footprint or bit of guano we can find that might lead us to the keys of Google’s ranking systems, even while we live in constant fear of punishment from its all-knowing servers.

It comes as no surprise that Google harbors a tremendous power to influence, say, the results of a certain upcoming political election, or even to sway public opinion on the latest Taylor Swift/Kanye West escapade. The question is – and it’s a contentious one – where does it all end?

At what point (and sooner or later, there must come a point) will the authorities and powers-that-be have to reign in Google’s master controls over internet content and searchability?

After all, the FCC’s net neutrality ruling last year made internet service practically a public utility – in regulation, if not in name. And after broadband service providers, no one has more influence and control over the flow of the web than Google does.

“If Google were just another mom-and-pop shop with a sign saying ‘we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone’, that would be one thing,” Epstein writes. “But as the golden gateway to all knowledge, Google has rapidly become an essential in people’s lives – nearly as essential as air or water. We don’t let public utilities make arbitrary and secretive decisions about denying people services; we shouldn’t let Google do so either.”

The day of reckoning for Google may come sooner than you might think.

Despite a long line of similar cases that have, without exception, ruled in Google’s favor – giving them free range to rank and rate content in whatever way they please – the E-Ventures case in Florida is actually making some headway.

Back in May, the federal judge on the case ruled that Google had “anti-competitive, economic” motives for blacklisting E-Ventures’ pages: the better SEO companies are at their jobs, after all, the less businesses need to pay for AdWords, which is how the search engine makes most of their revenue. It’s not, as Google argues, simply a matter of “free speech” anymore.

On a larger scale, the European Union is also trying to crack down on Google’s Internet monopoly.

Google claims 90% of the search engine market across the continent (compared to just 64% in the US), and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, the European Commission’s competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, says the company is unfairly using that leverage to promote its own advertising materials over that of the competition’s.

This is the third shot the EU has fired at Google in less than two years. Previously, Vestager & co. have filed antitrust complaints against the company over their search engine dominance and over the mandatory Google apps that come pre-loaded with every Android phone. “Google’s magnificent innovations don’t give it the right to deny competitors the chance to innovate,” Vestager says.

All three charges will likely come to a head before the summer’s through. So far, Google has, of course, denied any wrongdoing. But if the Commission succeeds in making a case, Google may have to pay as much as 10% of its revenue (i.e., in the neighborhood of $7 billion per annum) to the European Union to foster a more open, inclusive market.

It all begs the question: what would an SEO world look like where Google wasn’t necessarily the prime target of our efforts? Furthermore, what would happen to SEO analytics if Google’s criteria was for page rankings were completely transparent?

Experts have been saying for years that SEO strategies should be thinking outside the Google search box, but few other engines have been able to make so much as a dent in the web.

Bing, by comparison, is still only a tiny blip on the radar, with 14 billion indexed pages to Google’s 45 billion. The fastest-growing search engine on the scene is DuckDuckGo, a service that brags enhanced privacy and security.

While they manage to pull in 100 million visits every month, it’s still not much compared to Google’s 100 billion. Meanwhile, social media is trafficking more content than ever, and other search services like Yelp and Flickr have cornered markets where Google lags behind.

If the European Union has its way, more competing search engines might be able to increase their power, size, and scope – and forever change the internet landscape as we know it.

The bottom line: There is a world outside of Google. But will we know what to do with it once we’re there?

As far as I knew, it was a small, scrappy start-up that had nevertheless managed to make its mark in the world of search, dominated as it is by the vast and all-knowing Google.

Frustration with Google might be at a high at the moment with tax-dodging, increasing dominance of search (and now the mobile web) and removing ads on the right hand side at the expense of organic search results.

Therefore I was intrigued by the comments from DuckDuckGo fans on Jason Tabeling’s article on whether you should be paying more attention to DuckDuckGo, urging people to switch to DuckDuckGo and discover the ‘real internet’. How would searches from such a small engine stack up against Google’s, in everyday situations? Would using DuckDuckGo be an exercise in frustration, or a revelation?

I decided to test the waters, using it as my ‘go-to’ search engine every day for a week.

Privacy and customisability

The first thing I did was to install the app on my phone. DuckDuckGo has native apps for both iOS and Android, and compared to most apps which oblige you to sign away your first-born child before installing, its requirements are refreshingly simple.

Of course, this is DuckDuckGo’s main ethos: it “doesn’t track you”, as the desktop version of the search engine likes to remind you, and protecting your privacy is front and centre of its concerns. The mobile app has a straightforward and flexible set of privacy settings, including an option to enable Tor (this requires installing a proxy app like Orbot).

Compare this with Google’s rather lacklustre ‘Accounts & privacy’ settings:

The desktop version also boasts a range of privacy options, including the option to prevent sharing your search with sites you click on (a shame for anyone who tracks analytics, but great for privacy-focused users) and the ability to save your settings anonymously to the cloud.

DuckDuckGo lets you customise it in a whole variety of other ways, including changing the theme and modifying different parts of the appearance, which I had fun playing around with. You can even opt to turn off ads, and DDG helps you to make up for this by giving you ways you can spread the word instead.

I couldn’t help thinking that Google tries to customise your experience of using its search engine by gathering vast amounts of data and trying to intuit what you want, whereas DuckDuckGo simply lets you choose.

Fun with features

So now that I was all set up, how did it deliver with search? The first test came when I wanted to look up more information about a story a friend had mentioned on Facebook, about a baby dolphin dying after it was pulled from the ocean and passed around for selfies.

I couldn’t quite believe it was true, but a quick Duck (DuckDuckGo’s equivalent of the verb ‘Google’, though I’m not sure whether this one is going to catch on) confirmed that it was:

DuckDuckGo aims to win users over by being helpful without being intrusive. So it won’t amass vast stores of data in order to be unerringly, creepily accurate in predicting what you’re after, but it will, say, present you with a carousel of recent news stories on the topic you just searched.

One such useful feature is Instant Answers, which highlights information designed to give you a quick answer to your search query at the top of the page, similar to Google’s Knowledge Graph or Bing’s Snapshot Search and Autocomplete.

It’s a great idea in theory but falls down a little in its coverage of topics. A search for “Who is Thomas Jefferson”, for example, summons a little Wikipedia bio and a huge range of ‘related topics’ at the side, ranging from “burials at Monticello” to “American deists”; whereas a search for “what is a leap year” just returns a regular results page.

DuckDuckGo is an open source project, so Instant Answers, like many of its features, is community contributed: if you spot an area that doesn’t have an Instant Answer associated with it, you can get involved and add it yourself.

This has its advantages and disadvantages; on one hand, it gives users a practical way to improve the search engine in ways that are relevant to them. On the other, it requires Instant Answers to be added and refined one by one, which takes time and can be frustrating for users who just want to access the information they need in that moment, with the minimum of effort.

I didn’t get to truly put many of DuckDuckGo’s features through their paces with just a week of using the search engine, but it gave me a sense of how most of them could be used.

I enjoyed the way that search results scroll vertically into infinity instead of requiring you to click onto the next page to see more. It feels effortless and gives the impression of diving deeper into a topic, instead of the stigma which tends to surround ‘the second page of results’ on Google.

Then there are ‘!bangs’, a much-touted DuckDuckGo feature, which mystified me when I first saw the little exclamation point next to the search box in DuckDuckGo’s mobile app.

By typing an exclamation mark and a keyword – usually the website name – followed by your search term, you can search directly within a site from DuckDuckGo. So searching for “!ebay teapot” will take you straight to the search results for “teapot” on eBay.

It’s a neat little time-saver which has benefits for DuckDuckGo as well, as it collects a commission from eBay and Amazon for anything that you purchase from those sites after visiting them through DuckDuckGo.

!bangs work with many more websites than just those two, of course; the list of !bangs is currently over 7,800 sites long, and you can add any site that isn’t already covered by filling in a form. It’s unclear how long these take to process, though – after discovering that Search Engine Watch wasn’t on the list, I submitted it as a !bang, but at the time of writing it isn’t yet up and running.

Where DuckDuckGo falls down

When it comes to search engines that aren’t Google, I definitely consider DuckDuckGo to be ahead of the flock. With its unwavering emphasis on privacy, fine-tuned customisation and strong community, it has something genuinely different to offer users instead of just playing catch-up to Google with its features.

But it’s still a search engine that isn’t Google, and in spite of DuckDuckGo’s best efforts to offer a “smarter search”, it’s not able to match Google for sheer accuracy and intuition. A number of times as I researched articles throughout the week, I resorted to Googling something rather than waste any more time trying different keywords on DuckDuckGo.

Where DuckDuckGo falls down

Part of the problem is likely to be that as a lifelong Google user (except for a brief fling with Ask Jeeves in the very early days), I’ve moulded my search habits to fit with what I know works on Google, and I expect Google’s uncanny levels of accuracy in return.

The best example of this came up while I was researching a piece on what to consider before jumping on a new social media bandwagon for ClickZ. I couldn’t remember what the account verification icons on Vine, the equivalent of Twitter’s ‘blue tick’, were called. So I searched for “Vine green tick” on DuckDuckGo.

After several frustrated attempts and pages of nonsense results about grape vine pests and the comicbook superhero ‘The Tick’, I searched Google for “Vine green tick”. It immediately returned this as the top result:

Google: you have to admit, it gets results.

Whether Google used its semantic search techniques to know that I had been spending a lot of time on social networks and reading articles about social media to give the correct context to my search, or whether it was able to use its vast stores of data on what previous users had searched to intuit the right result, it was able to find in one search what DuckDuckGo couldn’t manage in four or five.

The question is, am I indignant enough about Google’s knowledge of my browsing habits (and everyone else’s that feed its all-knowing algorithms) to trade the convenience of instantly finding what I’m after for that extra measure of privacy online?

My assessment of DuckDuckGo after spending a week in the pond is that it’s a search engine for the long term. To get the most out of using it, you have to make a conscious change in your online habits, rather than just expecting to switch one search engine for another and get the same results.

Many of its features require you to actively contribute to the search engine to help make it better; you have to put in what you expect to get out. And you have to sacrifice some of what Google has trained you to expect from a search engine in order to ease yourself out of the filter bubble.

Does this bother you enough to change your search engine?
Photo by Patrick Barry, some rights reserved.

A lot of people are already bothered enough by what Google (and other huge, omnipresent online entities) has been doing to make the switch. As for me, while I’m not sure whether I’m ready to make the break with Google just yet, I’m listening.

I do think that DuckDuckGo is the only search engine offering something substantially different enough to challenge Google. It’s not backed by a huge corporation, but it doesn’t need to be. Actually, that would defeat the object of it.

Unlike most major search engines whose main offering is, let’s face it, ‘basically Google but slightly worse’, DuckDuckGo offers users genuine privacy, control, customisation, a certain amount of hipster street cred and an opportunity for endless duck puns.

And if you’re still not convinced, take a look at our mega list of alternative search engines to find your favourite.

If you enjoyed this article, check out our piece on the recent popularity of privacy-focused search engines: What’s behind the trend towards private search engines?

If you’re a regular Google user (65% of you globally) then you’ll have noticed some changes, both good and bad.

I won’t debate the merits of these improvements, we’ve done that already here: Google kills Right Hand Side Ads and here: Google launches Accelerated Mobile Pages, but there’s a definite feeling of vexation that appears to be coming to a head.

Deep breath…

As the paid search space increases in ‘top-heaviness’, as organic results get pushed further off the first SERP, as the Knowledge Graph scrapes more and more publisher content and continues to make it pointless to click through to a website, and as our longstanding feelings of unfairness over Google’s monopoly and tax balance become more acute, now more than ever we feel there should be another, viable search engine alternative.

There was a point not that long ago when you could easily divide people between those that used Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista. Now it’s got to the point where if you’re not using Google, you’re not really using the internet properly.

Right now though maybe we should be paying more attention to the alternatives. Maybe our daily lives and, for some of us, careers shouldn’t need to balance on the fickle algorithm changes of the world’s most valuable company.

Let’s see what else is out there in the non-Google world. It’s not that scary, I promise. Although you may want to bring a coat.

Please note: this is an update of an article published on SEW in May 2014, we felt like it needed sprucing up especially many of the listed engines (Blekko, Topsy) are no longer with us.

Bing

Microsoft’s search engine is the second most popular search engine in the world, with 15.8% of the search market.

But why should you use Bing? Lifehacker has some great articles where they try to convince themselves as much as anyone else why Bing is a serious contender to Google. Plus points include:

• Bing’s video search is significantly better than Google’s, giving you a grid of large thumbnails that you can click on to play or preview if you hover over them.
• Bing often gives twice as many autocomplete suggestions than Google does.
• Bing can predict when airfares are about to go up or down if you’re searching for flights.
• Bing also has a feature where if you type linkfromdomain:[site name] it will highlight the best ranked outgoing links from that site, helping you figure out which other sites your chosen site links to the most.

Also note that Bing powers Yahoo’s search engine.

DuckDuckGo

The key feature of DuckDuckGo is that it doesn’t retain its users‘ data, so it won’t track you or manipulate results based on your behaviour. So if you’re particularly spooked by Google’s all-seeing, all-knowing eye, this might be the one for you.

There’s lots more info on DuckDuckGo’s performance here.

Quora

As Google gets better and better at answering more complicated questions, it will never be able to match the personal touch available with Quora.

Ask any question and its erudite community will offer their replies. Or you can choose from any similar queries previously asked.

Dogpile

Dogpile may look like a search engine you cobbled together with clip-art, but that’s rather the point as it pulls in and ‘curates’ results from various different engines including Google, Yandex and Yahoo, but removes all the ads.

Vimeo

Of course if you’re going to give up Google, then you’ll also have to give up YouTube, which can be a terrifying prospect. But there is an alternative. And a pretty good one at that… Vimeo. The professional’s choice of video-sharing site, which has lots of HD video and no ads.

Yandex

This is a Russian portal, offering many similar products and services as Google, and it’s the dominant search engine in Russia.

As you can see it offers results in a nice logical format, replete with favicons so you can clearly see the various channels for your branded queries.

Boardreader

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of a subject with a variety of different points of view away from the major publications, Boardreader surfaces results purely from forums, message boards and, of course, Reddit.

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is a ‘computational knowledge engine’, or super clever nerd to you and me. Ask it to calculate any data or ask it about any fact and it will give you the answer. Plus it does this awesome ‘computing’ thing while it thinks about your answer (which can take a short while.)

It’s not always successful, you have to practice how to get the best from it. But at least it’s aware of the terrible 90s television show The Dinosaurs.

StartPage

Another search engine that puts privacy at the forefront, StartPage (originally Ixquick) was the first search engine to allow its users to search privately.

With StartPage, none of your details are stored (including your IP address) and no cookies are used, save for a single, anonymous cookie that’s used to remember your preferences. (For those who want to go “cookie-free”, StartPage has a URL generator alternative to save your settings).

Uniquely, StartPage also offers a proxy for those who want to not just search, but browse, the web in full privacy.

Ask.com

Oh look… Ask Jeeves is still around. Also he’s no longer a Wodehousian butler, but a computer generated bank manager. Weird.

It’s still a slightly mediocre search engine pretending to be a question and answer site, but the ‘Popular Q&A’ results found on the right hand side are very handy if Jeeves himself can’t satisfy your query. And what a good use of the right-hand side space, huh Google.

SlideShare

SlideShare is a really handy place to source information from presentations, slide decks, webinars and whatever else you may have missed from not attending a conference.

You’ll also be surprised what information you can find there.

Addict-o-matic

“Inhale the web” with the friendly looking hoover guy by creating your own topic page, which you can bookmark and see results from a huge number of channels in that one page (including Google, Bing News, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr).

Creative Commons Search

CC Search is particularly handy if you need to find copyright free images for your website (as discussed in this post on image optimisation for SEO). Just type your query in then click on your chosen site you want to search.

Giphy

Because really, when it comes down to it, we could imagine a worse dystopian future than one in which we all communicate entirely in Gifs.