17 Top Search Engines For 2025 (Ranked By Popularity)

Want to know what the best search engines are this year? I’ve got you covered.

In this post, I’ll reveal the 17 most popular search engines in the world right now, ranked according to their market share.

I’ll also provide a detailed overview of each search engine and share some interesting facts and figures about them along the way.

Note: I’ve used data from Statcounter in this post. In their dataset, market share is calculated based on search engine referrals, i.e. the share of website clicks resulting from searches on each engine. Their tracking code was installed on over 1.5 million websites and over 5 billion clicks were measured. 

#1 – Google

Google is the most popular search engine in the world by a huge margin, with a market share of 90.83%.

google search engine

In fact, Google’s dominance of the search market is so strong that the company has faced antitrust lawsuits. And in 2024, a US D.C Court Judge ruled it held an illegal monopoly over internet search.

Google was founded way back in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Menlo Park, California. It initially began as a research project while the pair were studying at Stanford University.

Back then, search engines were still ‘finding their feet’, and conventional search engines relied on counting the number of times search terms appeared on each website page to rank their results, which led to poor quality SERPs (search engine results pages)

Page and Brin had a better idea. They wanted to implement a system that used an algorithm to rank pages based on the number, quality, and relevance of backlinks pointing to each website.

They called this algorithm PageRank, and it served as the foundation for Google, which vastly improved the quality of the SERPs.

Google has been through many iterations since then and with every core update, the algorithm gets more sophisticated. This makes it tough for SEO professionals to keep pace, but it’s also the main reason Google continues to be considered the highest-quality search engine on the market. 

Stats:

  • Google accounts for 90.83% of the global search engine market
  • Google handles over 22 billion search engines every day (according to estimations)
  • Google is the most-visited website in the world
  • Google is the second most valuable brand in the world

Sources: Statcounter, Similarweb, Hubspot, Forbes

#2 – Bing

Bing is the second most popular search engine in the world with a market share of 3.96%. 

bing search engine

While that’s still a very long way away from Google, it’s nonetheless proven to be a serious challenger to Google’s monopoly and definitely tops the list of best alternative search engines.

Bing has been slowly chipping away at Google’s lead and has steadily increased its market share year-over-year, climbing from 2.7% in 2020 to 3.96% today. Over the same time, Google’s market share dropped from 92.08% to 90.83%.

The biggest challenge came on February 7, 2023, when Microsoft rolled out a major overhaul to Bing and introduced a new AI-powered search engine called Bing Chat, which runs on OpenAI’s GPT-4.

One million people joined the waitlist for Bing Chat, putting pressure on Google to release its own AI chatbot, which it later would (Gemini).

Bing is owned by Microsoft and was first launched in 2009, following on from its predecessor Live Search. 

Stats:

  • Bing accounts for 3.96% of the global search engine market
  • Bing handles around 900 million searches per day (according to estimations)
  • Bing has over 500 million unique visitors each month

Sources: Statcounter, BrightEdge, Backlinko

#3 – Yandex

Yandex is the biggest search engine you’ve never heard of and Russia’s answer to Google.

yandex search engine

It’s the third most popular search engine in the world with a global market share of 1.83%, but its users almost exclusively fall inside a handful of countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Turkey.

Yandex was first launched in 1997 by founders Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich and is known for its strong local search capabilities and ability to understand complex queries in Russian.

Aside from the search engine, it also offers other services, including Russia’s largest ridesharing service (Yandex.Taxi) and music streaming service (Yandex.Music). 

Stats:

Source: Statista, Statista3 Statcounter

#4 – Yahoo!

Yahoo! started out as one of the most used internet search engines, but its popularity has been in steep decline in recent decades.

yahoo search engine

Today, it has a market share of just 1.21% and is the fourth most used search engine globally. In comparison, in 2010, it had a market share of 3.93% and was the second most used globally. 

Yahoo! was founded in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, and is headquartered in California, US. While primarily a search engine, it now functions as a complete web portal, with related services like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Sports.

Stats:

  • Yahoo! accounts for 1.21% of the global search engine market
  • Yahoo! Handles an estimated 133 million searches per day
  • Yahoo! websites receive around 700 million visits per month

Sources: Statcounter, Forge and Smith, Market.us

#5 – Baidu 

Baidu is the biggest search engine in China but only the fifth most used search engine globally, with a 0.89% global market share.

baidu search engine

It was founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu and is deeply integrated with China’s digital ecosystem. The company offers a range of services including AI, video streaming, discussion forums, maps, and even autonomous driving.

One notable thing about Baidu is that it pioneered a lot of the technology used by Google. For example, Robin Li developed RankDex in 1996—the first search engine algorithm to use hyperlinks to measure site quality. 

That predates Google’s PageRank by 2 years. And in fact, Google’s founder Larry Page would reference Li’s work when developing PageRank.

Part of the reason Baidu is the dominant search engine in China is that Google is banned in the country. However, it has begun to face steeper competition from other Chinese search engines in recent years.

Stats:

  • Baidu accounts for 0.89% of the global search engine market…
  • …and 52.86% of the domestic Chinese search engine market
  • There are over 100 million Baidu searches per day
  • There are around 676 million users of the Baidu app

Source: Go-Globe, Statcounter, Statista2

#6 – DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is the sixth most popular search engine with a 0.59% market share. It’s also one of the fastest-growing search engines.

duckduckgo search engine

DuckDuckGo’s USP is its focus on online privacy—this is how it differentiates itself from its competitors. It’s one of the only search engines that doesn’t track its users or share their search history with third parties, earning it praise from online privacy advocates.

Founded in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg, it was one of the later search engines to hit the market. It’s grown its user base substantially since its launch and is quickly closing the gap on competitors like Yahoo!

Stats:

  • DuckDuckGo accounts for 0.59% of the global search engine market…
  • …and around 2.14% of the desktop search engine market in the US
  • DuckDuckGo handles an estimated 100 million searches per day

Sources: Statcounter, Backlinko2

#7 – Naver 

Naver is the seventh most popular search engine with a 0.34% global market share. 

naver search engine

However, it’s almost exclusively used only in South Korea, where it’s the dominant search engine with a 47.11% market share (more even than Google).

It was founded in 1999 by Lee Hae-jin and grew rapidly from there. By 2017, it was handling almost three-quarters of all search queries in the country.

Part of the reason for its success is that it’s highly customized for the domestic market, with deep integration with South Korean culture. It also offers other convenient services alongside its search bar, including Naver Maps, Naver News, Naver Shopping, and Naver Pay.

#8 – Cốc Cốc

Cốc Cốc is the most used Vietnamese internet search engine, with a global market share of 0.15%.

coc coc search engine

It’s the native search engine of the Cốc Cốc (formerly Cờ Rôm+) internet browser, which was launched in 2012. The browser is based on Chromium open source code, with a similar interface to Google Chrome.

The reason Cốc Cốc is so popular in Vietnam is that it has a lot of features specifically designed to cater to domestic users. For example, it has a feature to perform reverse domain name resolution, allowing users to bypass websites that are blocked in Vietnam (like Facebook).

It also automatically adds lingual tone to Vietnamese text, suggesting most likely tone arrangement variants without the need for third-party applications like VietKey. And it has a built-in English-Vietnamese dictionary to help English learners.

#9 – Haosou

Haosou is the ‘other’ Chinese search engine. It’s the second most popular search engine in China after Baidu, and the ninth most popular globally with a global market share of 0.14%.

haosou search engine

Haosou is part of the wider Chinese internet security company Qihoo 360, which was launched back in 2005.

In 2012, Qihoo 360 launched its own search engine, so.com, which became the biggest competitor to Baidu and soon claimed 10.52% of the market share. 

By 2014, it had increased its market share to over 35%. And in 2015, it would rebrand as Haosou—the name it’s known by today—which directly translates as “good search engine”. 

#10 – Ecosia

Ecosia is an eco-friendly search engine based in Berlin, Germany. It has a modest 0.1% share of the market, but that still makes it the 10th most used search engine globally.

ecosia search engine

Ecosia’s USP is that it devotes 100% of its profits to eco-friendly causes, mainly tree-planting projects, allowing users to help the planet as they search the web.

According to them, every search a user makes removes 1 kg of CO2 from the atmosphere. To date, Ecosia has planted over 218 million trees. 

It also uses renewable energy to power its services. So overall, it aims to absorb more CO2 than it emits, and claims to produce enough renewable energy to power all its searches twice over.

#11 – Sogou

Sogou is yet another Chinese search engine with a global market share of 0.07%.

sogou search engine

It was created by Wang Xiaochuan in 2010 and is headquartered in Beijing. It’s a subsidiary of Chinese technology companies Tencent and Sohu.

Like Haosou, Sogou is one of the leading competitors to Baidu search in the domestic Chinese market.

It’s the only search engine to integrate with Chinese super-app WeChat. It also has its own browser and offers a range of other hardware products including smartwatches, communication devices, and more.

#12 – Seznam

Seznam is a Czech web portal and search engine with a user base concentrated in the Czech Republic. It’s the 11th most-used search engine globally with a 0.04% market share.

seznam search engine

Founded in 1996 by Ivo Lukačovič, it was the first web portal in the Czech Republic. Initially, it offered both a search engine and an online ‘yellow pages’. Since then, it’s expanded to offer 30 different services including email.

A couple of decades ago Seznam was the most used search engine in the Czech Republic, but it’s been losing ground to Google. In 2012, its domestic market share had fallen to around 42%, compared to Google’s 54%. This dropped even further to 38% over the next couple of years.

#13 – Shenma

Shenma is another leading Chinese search engine with a global market share of 0.04%.

shenma search engine

It was founded in 2014, is headquartered in Beijing, and is run as a joint venture between Alibaba Group and UCWeb.

Shenma is part of the new wave of mobile-first search engines, with a user interface and browser optimized for mobile users. 

It’s a fierce rival of Baidu and Sogou and accounted for over 8.8% of China’s domestic search engine market as of 2017. Moreover, its mobile browser is very popular, with a 30% share of China’s mobile browser market.

#14 – Qwant

Qwant is a privacy-focused, French search engine with 0.02% of the global market share.

qwant search engine

It was launched back in 2013 by founders Jean-Manuel Rozan, Éric Léandri, and Patrick Constant, and is headquartered in Paris, France.

Qwant initially focused almost exclusively on the domestic market in France and claimed to be the second most-used search engine in the country in 2018.

However, by 2021, its traffic had become more spread out. Most of its traffic (51%) still comes from France, but much of it now also comes from the US (11%), Germany (10%), Canada (3%), and other countries.

Qwant has faced criticism for being too similar to Bing and still relies heavily on Bing’s API to provide relevant results.

#15 – AOL

AOL is a web portal and search engine with 0.02% of the global search engine market share.

aol search engine

It’s one of the oldest internet companies and was founded over 40 years ago in 1983 (formerly as Control Video Corporation). However, it didn’t launch its own branded search engine, AOL Search, until 1999.

As an American company, most of AOL’s search traffic comes from the US. But even domestically, it holds just 0.09% of the market share. And that has been in steady decline over the last few decades.

#16 – Petal Search

Petal Search is one of the newest search engines to hit the market and the 16th most popular, with a 0.02% global market share.

petal search search engine

It was released just four years ago (2020) by Huawei in response to US sanctions that barred Huawei from using Google Mobile Services.

Due to the sanctions, upcoming Huawei Android smartphones couldn’t use Google, so the company decided to create their own independent search engine.

As it was developed specifically for smartphones, Petal Search has taken a mobile-first approach. Its design is mobile-friendly with a neat dark mode, and it can present mobile app results from trusted app stores alongside web search results. Results are powered by Microsoft Bing.

#17 – Daum

Daum is the 17th most popular search engine this year with a 0.01% global market share. 

daum search engine

It’s one of the multiple search engines in South Korea—alongside Naver—that focuses almost exclusively on the domestic market. 

Daum was launched in 1997 and is owned by Kakao Corp. following a merger in 2014. It offers several internet services alongside search, including email, messaging, shopping, news, and webtoons.

It struggled to compete with Naver and has been in steady decline over the last decade, leading to the ‘phasing out’ of its brand name in various services.

Final thoughts

These are the 17 biggest and most popular search engines ranked by market share.

As you can see, Google continues to hold onto its market monopoly and handles the vast majority of web search queries and referrals. So it should be your priority when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization).

However, Google’s market share has been declining (albeit slowly), and it’s facing increasing competition from other search engines, particularly AI search engines like Microsoft Bing. 

Meanwhile, localized search engines continue to dominate domestic markets in regions like China and South Korea.