SearchEngines.Net is an independent reference about search engines themselves — what they are, who owns their indexes, where their results actually come from, how they make money, and which of them still exist. It is a reference work, not a business. It sells nothing, takes no engagements, and has no commercial relationship with any of the companies described on it.
That last point is the one worth stating first, because it is unusual. Most writing about search engines is produced by someone with a stake in the answer: a marketing agency, an engine's own communications department, a comparison site paid per referral, or an outlet running the engine's advertising. This site accepts no advertising from the engines it covers, no payment for inclusion, and no payment for placement or prominence. There is no affiliate arrangement behind any link here, no sponsored profile, and no way to buy a better description. An engine appears here because it is worth documenting, and it is described the way the evidence supports.
Who writes it
The site is written by Bill Hartzer, who has worked in search since the 1990s — from the era when AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos and Excite were plausible rivals, through the directory years, the meta-search generation, Google's rise to dominance, and the arrival of generative answers on top of the results page. That is a long enough run to have watched several confident predictions fail, which is a useful corrective when writing about a field that reinvents its own vocabulary every few years.
He is named here because a reference should say who wrote it. His other professional activities are deliberately not part of this site: they are not named, not linked, and not promoted anywhere on it. The separation is structural rather than decorative. A reference that also functions as a shop window for its author has a reason to be generous to some subjects and harsh on others, and a reader has no way to tell which is happening. Removing the incentive entirely is simpler than asking anyone to trust that it was resisted.
How the pages are written
Every engine profile on this site starts as a sourced fact sheet, not as prose. The fact sheet gathers what can actually be established about an engine — the operator and its registered ownership, the jurisdiction, the launch date, the crawler and its published user agent where one exists, any index-size figures the operator has stated and when, the business model, and any partner feed that supplies its results. Each item carries the source it came from and the date that source was consulted. Only then is the page written, and it is written from the fact sheet.
Four rules govern what happens next, and they are the whole argument for trusting anything here:
- The verdict about where an engine's results come from is stated with evidence. Every profile opens by saying whether the engine runs its own index, blends its own crawl with a partner's, resells another engine's results, is not a web index at all, or is no longer available — and the page then justifies that label from documented sources rather than from the engine's marketing.
- Source conflicts are printed, not averaged. When two credible sources disagree about a launch date, an index size or an ownership change, both appear, each attributed. Splitting the difference produces a number that no source supports and hides the fact that the question is open.
- Anything unverified is hedged in the sentence or left out. If a figure is widely repeated but traces back to no primary source, the page says so in those words. Nothing is stated plainly merely because it is commonly believed.
- Anything that can move is dated, and prices are described structurally. Market share, index sizes and partnerships are given with the month and the source. Subscription and API pricing is described by its shape — metered, tiered, advertising-funded — because published figures change and a page quoting last year's price is worse than a page that explains the model.
What the site does not do
It does not rank engines against each other or publish a “best” list presented as a verdict. Ratings of that kind compress incompatible criteria — index independence, privacy posture, result quality, language coverage, cost — into a single number that means nothing to a specific reader with a specific need. Where a superlative appears, it quotes a documented third-party measurement and names it.
It does not describe an engine's structure as a criticism of it. An engine that resells another company's results is not thereby a worse engine; several of them do it deliberately, say so publicly, and build a genuine product on top. What matters is that a reader who is choosing an alternative to a dominant engine knows whether the alternative is actually independent of it. That fact is the least-published and most useful thing about most search engines, so it leads every page.
It also does not cover search engine optimisation. Explaining how crawling, indexing and ranking work is the point of this site. Advice on improving a website's rankings is a different subject with a different reader, and mixing the two would give this site a commercial interest in the engines it is supposed to describe neutrally.
The domain
searchengines.net has been in use since the late 1990s. For its first several years it was a webmaster utility — a generator for the little search boxes that sites once embedded to offer visitors a search of WebCrawler, Dogpile, MetaCrawler, Mamma or Excite, with a page for each engine. Very little of that generation is documented carefully today, and much of what is written about it is recollection rather than record. The meta-search coverage here exists partly because this domain has a genuine claim to that history and partly because almost nobody else is keeping it straight.
Corrections
This is a reference site, so being told when it is wrong is useful rather than unwelcome. Corrections that identify the page, quote the claim and cite a source are acted on; the contact page explains what makes a correction easy to check. Pages are revised as engines change, and material that can no longer be sourced is hedged or removed rather than left standing. This page reflects the site as of 19 August 2026.