List of Internet Search Engines 2017

The term 'search engine' reminds us of the phenomenally popular search engine, Google. But there are several other search engines that are unique in their own special way. To browse through a list of all the Internet search engines, read on...

An Internet search engine is an information retrieval system that helps us find information on the World Wide Web. WWW is an unstructured database, which is growing exponentially. An Internet search engine indexes the information over the web to make it retrievable for the users.

List of Internet Search Engines

A9.com: It is a search engine from Amazon.com. Its search results are derived from Live Search and Amazon.com. Apart from having the features that many popular search engines have, A9.com includes results from the books on Amazon.com and has a unique ability of including searches inside books.

Accoona: This is an Internet company that is based in New Jersey whose main product is a search engine. The unique feature of their search engine is its capability of using artificial intelligence for refining its searches. The search engine also offers business profile searches.

Alleba: Designed in 2001 by Andrew dela Serna, a Filipino web designer, Alleba is a Philippine search engine that has helped many of the Philippine websites to gain an exposure on the Internet.

AltaVista: This is the name of a search engine company and also their search engine product. In December 1995, the company launched the search engine, AltaVista that offers excellent search facilities as well as free translation services.

Amatomu: It is a blog search engine that mainly retrieves blogs generated in South Africa.

Ansearch.com.au: This search engine is the main product of Ansearch, an Internet company in Australia. It was previously known by the name, Mysearch.com.au. It focuses on the quality of content, profiles websites and not merely the listing of web pages and adheres to popularity-driven ranking.

Araby.com: It is an Arabic search engine that is owned by Maktoob Inc, an Arab Internet services company.

Ask.com: The original idea behind this search engine was to provide the users with answers to their day-to-day questions. This search engine includes the searches from sites like Ask for Kids, Excite and MyWay.com. Formerly known by the name Ask Jeeves, this search engine is one of the very popular search engines today.

AskMeNow: It is an American public corporation that offers mobile search and mobile advertising facilities to its users. Its efficient mobile search facilities provide relevant answers to user queries posted in natural language.

Baidu: It is one of the popular Chinese search engines offering searches on websites, audio files and images. It is packaged with an encyclopedia and a discussion-based forum. It attracts millions of visitors every year.

Blinkx: Blinkx is an Internet search engine that is used for searching audio and video content. It uses the speech recognition techniques to enable the users to listen to the audio and video media over the Internet.

Bloglines: It is a web-based news aggregator founded by Mark Fletcher, former CEO of ONElist. It was sold to Ask.com in 2005.

BlogScope: It is a search engine meant for searching blogs and has been able to index about 120 million articles till 2007.

Bioinformatic Harvester: It is a bioinformatic metasearch engine that employs page-ranking strategies similar to Google.

Bixee.com: It is a job search engine in India that was started in 2005.

Brainboost: It is a metasearch engine that uses the techniques of machine language and natural language processing and offers answers to questions put in natural language.

BTJunkie: It is a BitTorrent search engine that searches torrent files.

Business.com: It is an Internet search engine and web directory that targets the executive and corporate management audiences. It focuses on the business-to-business market and employs pay-per-click advertising.

CareerBuilder.com: This is the largest online job site in the United States that offers career search options.

ChaCha: It is a mobile answers service that uses human guidance in answering questions. It is based in Indiana and was created by Scott A. Jones, an inventor and entrepreneur and Brad Bostic, the chairman of Bostech Corporation.

ChunkIt!: It is a personal search engine that is available in the form of a downloadable add-on for browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Clusty: It is a metasearch engine that was developed by Vivisimo.

Cuil: This search engines organizes the search results by the content of the pages and displays long entries with images for every result. This search engine, which was developed by some of the former employees of Google, claims to implement a privacy policy wherein the users' search activities are not stored.

DataparkSearch: This search engine organizes searches within a website, in groups of websites or a network. It is a free software written in the C language.

Daylife: It is a news aggregator. In simpler terms, it can be called news-browsing engine that provides access to the articles and images from a wide range of resources.

Dogpile: It is Infospace's flagship metasearch site that serves as a metasearch engine fetching results from a number of search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com and others.

EBI's Search Engine: It searches over the biological databases and aims at providing free bioinformatics services and training.

Egothor: It is an open source search engine that recognizes many of the common file formats and has a high capacity crawler. Being written in Java, it enables cross-platform compatibility.

Eluta.ca: It is a job search engine for the job opportunities in Canada. It was established with an intent to make job announcements that can be searched by every jobseeker in the country.

Entrez: It is a federated search engine that searches over a wide range of databases on topics such as health, genetic inheritance, biomedicine and population study.

Eurekster: This company based in New Zealand builds social search engines, which are called 'swickis'.

Exalead: It provides thumbnail previews of the target pages and facilitates the refinement of search results. It is a French search engine.

Ex.plode.us: It was initially designed as a social network and was re-launched in 2007 as a people search engine.

FindSounds: It is a website offering searches of more than 1,000,000 sounds and caters to a very large number of users around the world.

FlixFlux: It is a torrent search site that can be used to search for films and has the unique features like the marking of sites that are non-relevant to a particular search and providing the users with downloadable trailers of films.

Funnelback: It is an enterprise search engine that is popularly used by the universities and government organizations in Australia.

GenieKnows: It is a privately owned vertical search engine company that operates on online advertising and business-to-business transactions.

Geoportal: It is a popular web mapping service that is available in the French language.

goo: Looked after by NTT, a telecom company in Japan, goo is an Internet search engine and a web portal that indexes websites, which are in the Japanese language.

Google: Owned by Google, Inc, it is the most popular search engine of the present times. It receives several hundred million search queries everyday. Google Code Search is a free beta product from Google that enables the users to search open source code over the Internet. Google Maps is an extremely popular web mapping service provided by Google. It offers a business locater and a route planner for several nations of the world. Google News is a news aggregator that Google provides. Today, Google News is available in 19 languages and the development continues.

Gonzui: It is a source code search engine software that helps in searching source code written in different languages like C, C++, Java, Python and others.

GoPubMed: It is a knowledge-based search engine based on searching biomedical texts and proves helpful for biologists and medical professionals.

Grokker: It is a visual search engine that was developed by Groxis, a company based in San Francisco that deals with technology.

Grub: It is an open source distributed search crawler platform.

Guruji.com: Founded by two graduates from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Guruji.com is an Indian Internet search engine. It provides search results in the context of Indians.

Hakia: Riza Berkan, a nuclear scientist and Pentti Kouri, a venture capitalist from New York, developed this Internet search engine. 

Healia: It is a vertical search engine as also an online health community.

Home.co.uk: It operates in the United Kingdom and allows the users to search for properties and analyze house prices. 

HotBot: Previously, a search engine that offered free web page hosting for a short while is now a front-end for third party search engines.

HotPads: It is a rental housing and real estate search engine. It offers graphical maps to the users to ease their process of searching for property.

IceRocket: This Internet search engine is specialized in searching blogs.

IFACnet: It is an enterprise search engine that was launched in 2006 with an intent to provide the accountants all around the world an access to articles, practice guidance and management tools. It was created by IFAC, the International Federation of Accountants as a global and multilingual search engine for the accountants' domain of users.

Indeed.com: It is a job search engine that offers vertical job search, thus giving a new approach to the searching for job opportunities.

Info.com: It is one of the leading Internet search engines as also one of the pay-per-click directories.

IsoHunt: Founded in 2003 by Gary Fung, a Canadian, IsoHunt is an extensive BitTorrent index and a very popular BitTorrent search engine.

Ixquick: It is a metasearch engine that has provided more than 120 million searches since 2004. David Bodnick founded it in 1998. An interesting feature of this Internet search engine is that it uses a 'star system' to rank its results, wherein it assigns a star to each result retrieved by it.

Jexamples: It is a source code engine for Java language indexing source codes from several Java open source projects.

Kartoo: It is a metasearch engine with an excellent graphical user interface. It has the unique ability of refining searches through a single mouse click.

Kayak.com: It is a travel search engine website of the USA that helps the users search for hotels, airlines and cruises.

Koders: Koders is a search engine for open source code that indexes numerous open source code repositories.

Krugle: It helps programmers and software developers to search for open source code repositories and facilitates quick sharing of code.

Leit.is: It is an Icelandic Internet search engine that can search terms on specific websites, titles of websites and for websites linking to a particular website. This Internet search engine is available in both Icelandic and English languages.

LexisNexis: It is actually an archive that can be searched for newspapers, magazines and legal documents. It is the largest collection of public records, unpublished opinions and business information. Lawyers, students and journalists form a major sector of the LexisNexis users.

Lexxe: This Internet search engine uses natural language processing to answer user queries. It was established by Dr. Hong Liang Qiao, an Australian technology expert.

Live Search: It allows the viewing of additional search results on the same web page and adjusting the amount of information accompanying each search result. It facilitates the saving of searches. Live Search is the fourth most popular search engine. In 2009, Microsoft redefined 'Live Search' with the launch of Bing, an all new web search engine that came live in June 2009. It gives you a listing of suggested searches as you type in your search queries in it. Bing is a popular search engine today.

Live Search Maps: It is a web mapping service that comes packaged with the application services suite of Microsoft Windows Live.

Live Search QnA: It is a question and answer service operating on lines similar to Google Answers.

Lucene: It is an open source information retrieval library that is widely known for its use as a search engine.

Lycos iQ: It is a human search site and is driven by a community. Functionally it is similar to Google Answers.

Magellan: It is a search engine that was brought out by Excite, a popular Internet portal and a recognized brand on the Internet.

MagPortal.com: It is a search engine and directory that can be used to find online articles.

Mahalo.com: It is a web directory and can be called human search engine as it involves human effort in the form of editors writing search result pages.

Mamma.com: Herman Turnurcuoglu launched Mamma.com in 1996. In 2007, it was named as Copernic Inc. Mamma.com is the first metasearch engine.

MapQuest: It is a map publisher and an online web mapping service.

MetaCrawler: It is a metasearch engine that combines results from most of the top search engines of the world. It also offers searches on images, videos and news.

MetaLib: It is a federated search system that can simultaneously search a wide range of resources.

Miner.hu: It is a vertical search engine that searches for blogs and videos. It mainly handles the Hungarian content on the Internet.

Mininova: It is a very large torrent listing site that serves as a directory as well as a search engine for torrent files.

mnoGoSearch: It is an open source search engine with the capacity of searching multilingual websites and its results can be sorted by relevance. It is written in the C language.

Myriad Search: This metasearch engine founded by Aaron Wall combines search results from popular search engines like Yahoo and Google.

Nadji.si: Interseek created this search engine and web portal. It is the most visited website in Slovenia.

Namazu: It is a free full-text search engine software written in Pearl that can work as a web search engine.

Naver: Naver is a search portal popular in South Korea. It was launched in 1999 and was the first portal to have its own search engine. Reportedly, it ranks fifth in the list of the popular search engines in the world.

Newslookup.com: It is a news search engine, which is the first one allowing the users to search for news on the basis of the source region of the news organization. It includes the news from most of the prominent media sites and offers unbiased results to user queries.

NextBio: It is an interactive search engine that enables searches related to bioscience. It helps the researchers retrieve information related to their inventions and discoveries.

Nicado: Nicado Limited developed this search engine that is based on searching old email and old telephone numbers. Registered users are allowed to search the Nicado database by means of a telephone number or an email address.

Northern Light Group: It specializes in research portals, text analysis and enterprise search.

Nutch: It is an open source Internet search engine based on Lucene Java.

Omgili: It is a vertical search engine that bases its results on user-generated content like forums and discussion groups. It crawls over millions of online discussions.

Onkosh: It is a web portal for the Arabic web and facilitates web search, image search, file search as well as the search of blogs and forums. Onkosh also offers directory searches and displays Arabic news.

OpenFTS: It is a free software database search engine that is based on the PostgreSQL database.

Open Text 4: In 1994, the Open Text Corporation started hosting Open Text 4, a search engine, which competes with AltaVista.

PeekYou: Founded by Michael Hussey in April 2006, PeekYou is one of the very popular people search engines that has indexed over 150 million people from the United States and Canada.

Pharos: This is a European multimedia search engine that is being developed by Fast Search and Transfer, a Norwegian company that was founded in 1997.

Picsearch: This is actually a Swedish company that provides image, audio and video search over large websites. It also develops a video-sharing platform.

Pixsta: It is an image search engine designed by Dr. Daniel Heesch. It is not based merely on tags. It analyzes images to identify their attributes like shape, color and texture.

Podscope: It was the first consumer search engine, which created an index of spoken words.

Properazzi.com: It is an online real estate search engine that displays the properties to be rented and those for sale. It crawls the property listings from about 58 countries from Europe.

PubGene: It is a public search engine that provides information related to health and medicine.

Rambler: It is one of the biggest web portals of Russia and a Russian search engine. Apart from web search it also offers email facilities, media and e-commerce applications.

Recruit.net: It is a job search engine that is available in English, Japanese and Chinese versions, making it an international search engine.

Rediff.com: It is a web portal offering news, information, and entertainment and shopping. It appears fifth in the list of popular Indian portals.

Rollyo: It is a Yahoo-powered search engine that was founded by Dave Pell and designed by Angus Durocher and Dan Cederholm. It allows its registered users to create search engines that retrieve results from a set of websites defined by the user.

SAPO: Its full name is Servidor de Apontadores Portugueses and is a brand and subsidiary company of the Portugal Telecom group. It is an Internet service provider that is a search engine since 1995.

Sciencenet: It is an experimental search engine that is based on peer-to-peer technology. It was developed by Michael Christian at Karlsruhe Institute.

Search.ch: Rudolf Raber and Bernhard Seefeld established search.ch as a regional search engine. Today, it is the second most popular search engine in Switzerland. In addition to search options, it also provides the users with phonebook facilities.

Searchmedica: It is a series of medical search engines that is built by doctors for their own community.

SeeqPod: It indexes audio and video media that are playable over the Internet.

Sesam: It is a Scandinavian Internet search engine that is available in Norwegian as well as Swedish versions. In 2007, it was among the largest websites of Norway. 

SimplyHired.com: It is one of the major job search engines of the USA. 

ShopWiki: Kevin P. Ryan, the former CEO of DoubleClick founded this Internet shopping search engine in 2005. It was launched in 2006.

SideStep: It is a metasearch engine that combines the results from over 200 travel websites. It also searches hotels and airlines worldwide.

Sogou: Launched in 2004, this Chinese search engine can search text, images and maps. It competes with Baidu.

Sohu: It is a China-based search engine company that offers a search engine along with other services like online gaming.

Sphere: It is a blog search engine that organizes bloggers by topic and uses semantic matching to retrieve relevant information.

Sphinx: It is a free software search engine that mainly indexes databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. It has high searching and indexing speeds and supports distributed searching.

Spock: It is a website search engine that indexes people. 30% of its searches are people-related.

Spokeo: It is a social-network-based people search service. It is capable of searching a group of people at a time. It should not be mistaken as being a social networking site.

SWISH-E: The name stands for Simple Web Indexing System for Humans - Enhanced. It indexes document collections.

Technocrati: This Internet search engine is used for searching blogs. It indexes as many as 112.8 million blogs and about 250 million tagged writings.

TEK: The name is short for 'Time Equals Knowledge'. It is an email-based search engine that requires the user to send a query via an email to their server, which then performs the search on the user query. It was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

TheFind.com: It is known as a discovery shopping search engine and was launched in 2006. It uses an algorithm based on relevance and popularity and focuses on lifestyle products.

Topix: The Founders of the Open Directory Project created this news aggregator. It also has a community news-editing platform and a forum allowing users to comment on news articles.

Torrentz: It is a metasearch engine that combines the searches from several different torrent sites.

Trexy: It is a metasearch engine that allows the users to trace back their search activities by implementing the concept of searchable search trails.

Turbo10.com: It is an Internet metasearch engine that can search 10 databases simultaneously and accesses information from about 800 online databases.

Uclue: It is a research service that allows the users to post queries in the form of questions. Most of the members that form the Uclue team are former researchers of Google Answers.

Velocity: This is a part of the search suite developed by Vivisimo, an enterprise search software company in Pittsburgh, USA.

Vtap.com: This is a metasearch engine that has been developed by Veveo, Inc, a startup company in Massachusetts.

Walla!: It is an Israeli Internet news portal as also a search engine and an mail service provider. It provides news from Israel and from the rest of the world and is one of the most popular websites in Israel.

Wazap!: It is a vertical search engine that indexes gaming sites. It uses an internal algorithm to rank the indexed pages according to their relevance. Apart from being a search engine, it is also a social networking site and a video game database.

WebCrawler: It is a metasearch engine that combines the search results of some of the very popular Internet search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and others. It was the first search engine that could provide a full text search.

WebMD: It is a medical information service that provides health information and offers medical newsletter and answers to medicine and disease related questions.

Wikia Search: The striking feature of this web search engine is that it is an open source search engine facilitating the users with abilities to rate, modify and enhance the search results.

Wink: Wink is a community-based social search engine that offers the means to search people over different social networks. It is different from other search engines in terms of its algorithms for retrieval of search results. It bases the search results on user inputs.

YaCy: YaCy is a free and distributed search engine that is based on peer-to-peer technology. 

Yahoo! Search: Starting as a web directory, it has evolved into a fully formed search interface. Standing in competition with Google, Live Search and Ask.com, Yahoo has emerged as the second most popular search engine. Yahoo! News is an Internet-based news aggregator that offers news of all the sectors including business, entertainment, science, health and popular news. Yahoo! Maps is one of the very popular web mapping portals by Yahoo!. Yahoo! Answers is a community-driven website that allows the users to post questions and find answers to them. Yahoo! HotJobs is an online search engine providing tools and advice for job seekers and employers.

Yandex: It is a Russian search engine and the largest web portal of Russia. In terms of its number of users and the breadth and depth of its search domain, it is the largest Russian search engine. Rambler is in close competition with Yandex.

YouTube: It is a video sharing website that allows uploading and downloading of video files. As such, it attracts millions of users in search of videos and is looked upon as a treasure of videos of the old and the new times. YouTube search facilities return millions of videos and user channels.

YouTorrent: It is a BitTorrent search engine that can combine the searches from different torrent search engines.

Zabasearch.com: It searches for information related to the residents of the United States such as their names, addresses and phone numbers.

Zettair: It is a compact search engine that mainly aims at searching text and indexes HTML collections.

Zoominfo: It is a vertical search engine that can create summaries of people and organizations it happens to crawl. It offers results for people related searches.

This was a list of the Internet search engines which are currently in use.