In a nutshell: What is a search engine?
Anyone who has ever been on the Internet is familiar with search engines. These are websites that allow users to search the web for specific data, content, products or information by entering a search term.
The search results cover websites, but also search engine ads, images, videos, news articles and advertisements. Google is by far the world's most popular search engine.
The 5 most popular search engines in Germany and the world
Have you ever used a search engine other than Google? Probably not, because Google has a market share of over 90 % in most countries.
In many countries, however, Google services are restricted or even banned altogether, for example in China. The search engines Baidu and Sogou, as well as Microsoft's Bing, are the market leaders there.
Due to China's large population, these Internet search engines also have a large market share worldwide, although they are repeatedly at the mercy of accusations of censorship.
Nevertheless, we will first concentrate on the 5 search engines that are particularly popular in Germany.
1st place: Google
The Google search engine was launched in 1998 and has since become the most frequently accessed website and therefore the largest search engine in the world.
Google has defined its corporate goal as sorting the world's information and making it publicly accessible. However, Google does not just deliver information or the websites on which this information can be found.
In fact, the search engine now also plays an important role in the marketing of countless companies and sectors.
Google reviews, advertisements, search engine optimization: all of this and much more plays a decisive role in how a brand or company is perceived from the outside.
2nd place: Bing
Bing is the second most popular search engine in Germany and the world, even if it remains well behind Google with a market share of 4.3% in Germany and 8.9% worldwide.
Bing is a search engine from Microsoft that went online in 2009. It is therefore one of the newer search engines that is constantly evolving.
The functions and presentation of content are very similar to Google's interface. In some areas, such as the HD wallpaper or the automatic video preview, Bing even has the edge. Nevertheless, the search engine is somewhat less comprehensive overall.
Just like Google, Bing is an index-based search engine. In the rest of this article, Timo Specht will explain what this means and what other types of search engines there are.
3rd place: Yahoo
Yahoo has also been on the market for quite a long time. In 1994, even before Google was launched, the US company put the search engine of the same name online and shortly afterwards also the webmail service and the Flickr platform.
What's special about Yahoo: Unlike most other search engines, the service is completely independent of Google's algorithms. The search is based on its own search index with a web crawler.
Until 2013, Yahoo enjoyed great success as part of the US investment company Altaba Inc. and held its own against the competition - in particular thanks to Marissa Mayer, a former product manager at Google who became CEO of Yahoo in 2012. For example, she bought the blogging platform Tumblr.
However, following wiretapping scandals and hacker attacks, the company suffered heavy losses just one year later. Despite some advantages over Google, the company has still not recovered from these setbacks.
Nevertheless, the search engine is in third place after Google and Bing with a global market share of around 2.6%.
4th place: DuckDuckGo
You may not have heard of DuckDuckGo yet. Nevertheless, this meta search engine has a higher market share in Germany (0.5%) than Yahoo (0.3%).
The physicist and founder Gabriel Weinberg launched it online in 2008. His aim was to provide more relevant content and less advertising than the competition.
To do this, DuckDuckGo accesses over 400 sources, including Wikipedia, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo's own web crawler.
The special feature: The search engine has many special filter options that can be used to filter search results according to commercial sales websites or pure information platforms, for example.
Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo's main goal is to improve the privacy of searchers during their web search.
As is typical for a meta search engine, the search engine does not collect any user data, but provides all users with the same search results.
5th place: Ecosia
Ecosia is similarly unknown in Germany as DuckDuckGo. This is also reflected in its market share. It is around 0.71% in Germany.
The search engine, which is primarily committed to environmental protection, has no economic relevance worldwide. This probably also has to do with its place of foundation. Ecosia was developed in Berlin by entrepreneur Christian Kroll.
The special thing about Ecosia is that a tree is planted for every 30 or so search queries to offset the electricity consumption for the servers. As a result, the green search engine, which went online in 2009, had planted 200 million trees by February 2024.
The project is financed by advertising revenue because, similar to Google, paid ads appear at the top of the SERPs after a search.
The different types of search engines and how they work
There are many different internet search engines around the world. You might ask yourself why this is the case if Google seems to provide all the information.
The different types of web search engines produce better or worse search results depending on the search intention. Timo Specht will now show you how you can benefit from search engines other than Google.
Index-based search engines such as Google
Most web search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex or Yahoo are based on their own search index. This involves the use of analysis programs known as web crawlers.
They automatically search and analyze a variety of data on websites on the Internet in order to deliver the most relevant results for the search. In addition to website landing pages, this can also include videos, PDF files or images.
The order in which certain search results are delivered depends primarily on the search term or keyword combination.
During data processing, the crawler searches the websites that best match the search and were most frequently clicked on in the past by users who made a similar search query.
In addition, websites are analyzed according to content, headlines, backlinks and URL, but also according to their technical stability, in order to deliver particularly satisfactory results.
Optimizing your website for search engines helps you to be displayed as high up as possible in the SERPs on the start page. This involves making websites more user-friendly, but also optimizing them for specific terms.
One example is to include the main keyword as high up as possible and to populate the headings with secondary keywords that match the topic.
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Meta search engines such as Apollo7 and Metager
Unlike Google or Bing, meta search engines such as Metager, Apollo7, Metacrawler, Qwant or DuckDuckGo do not have their own databases, i.e. no index that they use for search queries.
Instead, meta search engines scan the search index of various index-based search engines in order to provide a wider range of results. The source is always mentioned after the search result.
The sources usually also determine the algorithms, i.e. the order of the SERPs. In addition, users can select more precise filter options in most meta search engines in order to get more suitable search results for their benefit.
Many meta search engines have stricter data protection regulations. For example, no personal data is often collected or stored during meta searches.
Even the IP address remains hidden by means of proxy or certain privacy settings. The disadvantage: metasearch engines usually take longer to process a search query.
Catalog search engines
Catalog-based search engines or directory search engines have their own search index. Editorial staff decide on the indexing, i.e. whether certain content is included in the directory or not.
The order or presentation of the search results on the Startpage also differs from index and meta search engines. For example, results can be sorted alphabetically or by subject area.
Classic examples of catalog search engines are search engines for children such as fragFINN or Blinde Kuh. New content is always checked by employees for child-friendliness.
Wikipedia is another such catalog search engine, as it uses its own database and new content is checked editorially beforehand.
Other types of search engines & special search engines
Meta search engines, index-based and catalog-based search engines are the 3 most important types of web search engines.
A newer type of search engines are AI-based search engines such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or other AI services such as Bing AI, which access the search index of the associated search engine.
AI programs usually only provide a single result for a search query, combining search results from different sources to answer the search query as correctly and relevantly as possible.
AIs can also be described as semantic search engines. This is because this type of search engine can capture and understand the meaning of longer word combinations.
In a semantic search engine, not only keywords but entire texts are entered as search queries.
In addition, there are programs and search services that can also be defined as search engines in the broadest sense - for example, the search bar on social media or sales and comparison platforms. These are the most important special search engines:
Product search engines/price search engines |
Children's search engines |
Search engines for image / video search |
Real estate search engines |
Hotel / travel search engines |
Idealo |
Blind cow |
YouTube |
Immowelt |
Trivago |
Cheaper.co.uk |
askFINN |
Dailymotion |
Immonet |
TravelScout24 |
Amazon |
Bright little head |
Shutterstock |
ImmoScout24 |
Vacation pirates |
Check24 |
Qwant Junior |
Vimeo |
WG wanted |
Momondo |
eBay |
Strong sides |
Pixabay |
ThinkImmo |
HolidayCheck |
Of course, there are other types of special search engines. For example, online pharmacies could also be described as search engines. This is usually a special type of catalog search engine.
This is because they do not search the entire web, but use a specially selected search index in order to fulfill the user's search intention as accurately as possible.
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Conclusion: What is a search engine?
A wide variety of search engines are available for your web search. We use many of them every day without even being aware that they are search engines - for example on comparison platforms or when looking for a hotel for our next vacation.
These are special catalog or directory search engines that only access selected, specially created databases when retrieving data.
The situation is different with index-based search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. They use their own web crawlers to search through as much data and content on the web as possible.
This is used to create an algorithm or a sequence for the search results that matches the user and their search intention as closely as possible.
This is hardly possible without collecting personal data. Information about user behavior or previous search history is tracked.
If you want to protect your privacy and still get relevant search results on your Startpage, you can use meta search engines such as DuckDuckGo.
They take a little longer for search queries, as they compile various results from index-based search engines and base their rankings on the algorithms of these search engines.
In addition, they often have more filter options to display search results that are as relevant as possible, even without user tracking.