Whether for privacy concerns, environmental awareness, simple choice, because of censorship in their country or to disapprove of Google’s decisions in Canada, hundreds of millions of Internet users around the world use other research. What are they worth, what do they add, which ones to choose? Overview.
Global market share in June 2023 of Google’s search engine, according to StatCounter. On a global scale, the domination of the tool created in 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page has never wavered since 2004, when Google dethroned Yahoo!.
Behind Google have succeeded many competitors. The only ones who managed to dislodge it did so in two specific countries: Baidu in China (61.5% of the market in June, where Google is banned) and YANDEX in Russia (58.2%). Elsewhere, the race for second best has essentially pitted Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, against the indestructible Yahoo!, which has been using Bing results since 2019. As this table indicates, only DuckDuckGo has also succeeded to impose a significant presence on a planetary scale.
There are, however, many others. We have selected two, in addition to the four engines already mentioned. Baidu only offers results in Mandarin, so it is of little interest in North America. We tested their relevance by giving them a score out of 10 based on their answers to six questions, and subjectively judged the clarity and beauty of their design with the same scale.
In order not to benefit those who collect cookies, all search queries were made in private browsing. All tested engines can be found by adding “.com” to their name. Only one search engine received a perfect score of 10 out of 10 for its relevance. Answer at the end of the text. The exercise, of course, is nothing scientific.
Microsoft’s search engine has been second in the world in popularity since 2015 and since early 2023 has offered a powerful argument to compete with Google: ChatGPT, whose technology can be integrated into its answers. The effects on its attendance, however, are slow to manifest themselves, according to data from StatCounter. In addition to its exemplary ability to give precise and relevant answers, Bing is distinguished by a beautiful design, a dynamic and varied presentation, with inspiring wallpapers, thumbnails and many sidebars. Bing, in our tests, only lost points for relevance on one question, where the answer was ranked 9th.
Surprising that Yahoo!, which uses Bing’s technology, was so imprecise in its answers. As for the dated design, it’s reminiscent of Yahoo! is a web veteran, founded in 1994, which made its mark as a catalog before adding a search portion. Its popularity, while it remains in third place, is likely related to the fact that Yahoo! is in fact a real web portal, bringing together sites, news, messaging and games.
The selling point of DuckDuckGo, which has allowed it to take off slowly since 2015 to settle in third position in North America, is the protection of personal data. The searches leave no trace and there is no follow-up. This does not prevent the engine created in 2013 from being completely reliable and being very moderate in the display of its advertisements. The interface is very simple, and the site relies effectively on the source of the request to better sort the responses.
Undoubtedly the least interesting of the search engines we tested. Very popular in Russia, YANDEX seems poorly adapted to North America, while he could not give us a relevant link for the Health budget in Quebec, gave useless answers to change the battery of a iPhone and did not seem aware of the recent resignation of caquiste Joëlle Boutin. The presentation of categories with icons is successful, however.
This French search engine launched in 2013 also puts forward the protection of personal data, and its colorful, but refined presentation is very successful. Rather, it performed well on five of our questions, but never managed to find a recent La Presse article by matching the names of the journalist and the company. Qwant has stood out since 2015 with the junior version of its search engine, which filters the results of any violent or pornographic reference.
Founded in 2020 by former employees of the software company Salesforce, You.com uses artificial intelligence and ChatGPT 4 in all the sauces to offer relevant links, articles to buy and advice of all kinds. Any query gives two types of results: on the left a paragraph in natural language, on the right classic hyperlinks. The result is rather refreshing and original, combining texts, images, maps and videos in well-identified tabs. Its relevance is good, but its score was affected by two responses where the correct result appeared too far away.
The only engine that scored a perfect 10 out of 10 for relevance in our tests is Google.
