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Machine-readable

EntityMap of search engines and search concepts

A structured, machine-readable description of the entities this site covers and short extractive passages from the pages that describe them, published to the entitymap.org v1.0 specification.

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121 entities. Generated 2026-08-19.

Entities

Google Thing

Google Search is the dominant general-purpose web search engine and one of a small number that genuinely crawls the open web itself. Its crawler, Googlebot, builds an index that Google alone ranks; several other engines resell Google's results rather than crawl. Since 2024 the results page has increasingly led with AI-generated summaries rather than links.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

Google Search is the world's dominant general-purpose web search engine, and it is one of a genuinely small number of engines that builds its own index — the engine's own stored copy of the web, assembled by its own crawler. When a query returns ten links, those links come from Google's index, ranked by Google's own systems. No other general search engine supplies them. That matters more than it sounds, because most of the search market runs on borrowed results. Startpage resells Google's results as its product. Yahoo has resold results for its

Google Search — SearchEngines.Net

Microsoft Bing Thing

Microsoft Bing is a general web search engine that crawls the open web with its own crawler, bingbot, and ranks its own index. It is one of a very small number of independent Western web indexes, and it supplies web results to Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and others. To a user it resembles Google; upstream, it is the reason a non-Google search ecosystem exists at all.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing

Microsoft Bing crawls the open web with its own crawler and ranks its own index — the engine's own stored copy of the web. It takes web-link results from no other general search engine. That deserves stating flatly and up front, because the most common error made about Bing is to file it as a second-tier reseller sitting downstream of somebody else's work. It is the opposite. Bing is one of only two large independent indexes of the open web in the Western market, and the other one is Google's. The consequence runs through the whole search

Microsoft Bing — SearchEngines.Net

Yahoo! Search Thing

Yahoo Search is the search box on Yahoo's portal, and it finds nothing itself. Its web results have come from Microsoft Bing since the Search Alliance signed in 2009, and Yahoo retired its own crawler during the migration that followed. What Yahoo adds is a brand, an interface, a large signed-in audience, its own verticals and a re-ranking layer over somebody else's index.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo_Search

This is the fact almost everyone gets wrong about Yahoo, so it goes first. Yahoo has not operated a general web crawler or a web index since 2010. Every web link returned by yahoo.com comes from Microsoft Bing's index, supplied under the Microsoft–Yahoo Search Alliance signed on 29 July 2009. Yahoo is a brand, an interface, a very large signed-in user base, and a set of ranking and personalisation adjustments applied on top of another company's crawl. That is not a criticism, and it is not unusual. Resold results are a legitimate product structure

Yahoo Search — SearchEngines.Net

DuckDuckGo Thing

DuckDuckGo is a privacy-first search engine and a wider privacy product suite. It does operate documented crawlers of its own and maintains its own indexes for Instant Answers, but the ranked web links it shows are largely sourced from Microsoft Bing. It stores no search history against an identity and shows every user in a region the same results.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

Ask where DuckDuckGo's results come from and you will get one of two confident replies. The first is that DuckDuckGo has its own index. The second is that DuckDuckGo is just a Bing wrapper. Neither is right, and the truth is more interesting than either. DuckDuckGo runs real, documented crawlers of its own — DuckDuckBot and DuckAssistBot — and maintains its own indexes. Those are not marketing claims: both crawlers publish user-agent strings, both are observable in server logs, and DuckDuckGo documents them. So “no crawler of its

DuckDuckGo — SearchEngines.Net

Startpage Thing

Startpage is a privacy front end rather than a search engine. It has no crawler and no index of its own; it forwards your query from its own servers to third-party engines, strips out anything that identifies you, and returns their results. From July 2009 until March 2023 that third party was Google alone. Since then it has been Google and Bing.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startpage

Startpage is a search front end . It has no crawler — no software of its own that fetches pages from the web — and therefore no index, meaning no stored copy of the web it could rank. What it has is a relationship with the companies that do. The mechanism is simple. You type a query into Startpage. Startpage's servers pass that query on to third-party search engines, without your IP address, your cookies or any account identifier attached. Those engines answer Startpage, not you. Startpage returns their results on its own page, with trackers removed and

Startpage — SearchEngines.Net

Ecosia Thing

Ecosia is a Berlin search engine that spends the large majority of its advertising profits on tree planting and landscape restoration. For most of its life its results were bought in from Microsoft Bing. Since August 2025 it has blended Bing and Google with Staan, a European web index built by a joint venture Ecosia owns half of, which makes it a hybrid rather than a pure reseller.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia

Almost everything written about Ecosia says it is Bing with a tree counter attached. That was a fair description for most of the engine's life. It is out of date, and the correction is the single most important fact on this page. As of August 2026, Ecosia's own help centre names three sources for the results and the ads on them: Microsoft Bing , Google , and EUSP — European Search Perspective . The third of those is not a syndication partner. It is a company Ecosia owns half of, which runs a crawler, holds an index of its own, and has been answering

Ecosia — SearchEngines.Net

Qwant Thing

Qwant is a French search engine built around privacy and European digital sovereignty. It runs its own crawler and index, supplements them with Microsoft Bing where its own relevance is weak and for images, and since August 2025 also draws on Staan, the index built by its 50:50 joint venture with Ecosia. That blend makes it a hybrid rather than an independent engine.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant

Qwant is a general-purpose search engine operated from France, positioned around privacy and European digital sovereignty. It returns a conventional results page — web, images, news, maps — with no behavioural tracking and no third-party cookies. Getting its result sourcing right requires describing three layers, because any account with fewer than three is wrong. First, its own crawler and index. Qwant operates a crawler called Qwantbot , which fetches pages from the open web so Qwant can store and rank them itself. In September 2023 the company stated

Qwant — SearchEngines.Net

Mojeek Thing

Mojeek is an independent British search engine that crawls and indexes the web itself. It has never resold another engine's web results at any point in its history, which makes it unusual even among engines marketed as independent. It is also small — an index of around 9 billion pages as of 2025, against Google's hundreds of billions — and that size determines who it works for.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojeek

Mojeek is a small British search engine that crawls the web with its own crawler and answers every query from its own index — the engine's own stored copy of the web. There is no partner feed. There never has been. At no point in the engine's history has it resold Google's, Bing's or anyone else's web results. That sentence is worth dwelling on because it can be said of almost nothing else in the privacy-search category. Brave Search became fully independent in 2023 after two years as a hybrid. Qwant was found in 2019 to have no crawler at all while

Mojeek — SearchEngines.Net

Swisscows Thing

Swisscows is a Swiss-operated search engine that displays Microsoft Bing's web results without cookies, accounts or ad profiling. Its distinguishing feature is not privacy but a permanent adult-content filter that users cannot disable. Around the search box the company sells a VPN, encrypted messaging, email and cloud storage.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swisscows

Swisscows is a Swiss-operated search engine built on somebody else's index. The index is the stored copy of the web that an engine's crawler has collected and that its ranking software sorts; Swisscows does not have one. Type a query into swisscows.com and what comes back is Microsoft Bing's web results, rendered without tracking cookies, without an account and without a behavioural profile. This is not an inference drawn from testing. Swisscows says it in its own words. The company's blog describes an "exclusive partnership with Bing" and states that

Swisscows — SearchEngines.Net

Gibiru Thing

Gibiru is a small American search site that markets itself as the only fully anonymous, uncensored search engine. No Gibiru crawler, index or user-agent has ever been published, and its founder described the product in 2012 as a modified Google feed with tracking stripped out. One current review disputes that and claims an own index; both positions are set out on this page.

Gibiru is a small American search site that describes itself as the only fully anonymous, uncensored search engine. What a user gets is a stripped-down results page with no cookies, no login and a toggle between ordinary results and an “uncensored” mode that is said to surface pages mainstream engines suppress. The pitch is explicitly political: the site has long asserted that government and platform pressure removes alternative-news outlets from mainstream results, and its audience comes from that framing rather than from technical privacy circles. The

Gibiru — SearchEngines.Net

SearXNG Thing

SearXNG is not a website somebody runs for you. It is free, AGPL-licensed metasearch software that forwards your query to a configurable set of other engines, strips your identity from those requests, and merges what comes back. It has no crawler and stores no documents, and every deployment is configured by whoever runs it.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SearXNG

Almost everything written about SearXNG starts from a mistaken premise, so this page corrects it first. There is no such thing as "the SearXNG." No company, no owner, no canonical address, no service anyone operates on your behalf. SearXNG is free AGPL-3.0 software that you install on a server — or that a volunteer has already installed on theirs and left open to strangers. What it does is metasearch. You give it a query; it asks a configurable set of other engines — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Wikipedia, Wikidata, arXiv, GitHub and

SearXNG — SearchEngines.Net

Marginalia Search Thing

Marginalia is an independent search engine built and run by one person in Sweden. It operates its own crawler and its own index, forwards no queries to Google or Bing, and deliberately ranks the web backwards: heavy advertising, scripts and commercial optimisation push a page down, while plain text and age push it up.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalia_(search_engine)

Marginalia is a search engine built by one person in Sweden that crawls the web itself and ranks it more or less backwards from the way Google does. Heavy JavaScript, dense advertising, affiliate links, tracking scripts and modern optimised design push a page down . What rises instead is text: personal sites, old blogs, university department pages, hobbyist documentation — the parts of the web with no marketing budget and consequently no visibility in mainstream results. The verdict at the top of this page is own index , and it needs no hedging at

Marginalia Search — SearchEngines.Net

Kagi Thing

Kagi is a subscription search engine with no advertising anywhere in the product. It operates its own crawler, Kagibot, feeding its own non-commercial web index (Teclis) and news index (TinyGem), but the bulk of a typical results page comes from anonymized API calls into third-party commercial indexes. What Kagi actually sells is the ranking and filtering layer on top of that blend, not an index independent of Google's ecosystem.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagi

Kagi is a paid web search engine. There is no advertising anywhere in the product, no sponsored placement at the top of a results page, and no advertiser whose interests the ranking has to accommodate. You pay a subscription; in return you get a results page with controls no conventional engine offers, most notably the ability to raise, lower, pin or permanently block any domain from your own results. The question a reader usually arrives with is whether that subscription buys an index independent of Google and Bing. It does not, and this is the single

Kagi — SearchEngines.Net

Perplexity Thing

Perplexity is an answer engine: you ask a question in natural language and get written prose with numbered inline citations, rather than a list of links. It began life as a summarisation layer over the Bing Search API, but as of 2025 it documents its own crawler and an index it describes as covering over 200 billion unique URLs. Its retrieval independence is real; its record on how it acquires that content is the most contested in the category.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI

Perplexity is an answer engine . You ask a question in ordinary language and it returns a written answer with numbered inline citations pointing at the pages it drew from, plus suggested follow-up questions. There is no list of ten blue links; the links exist as supporting evidence for prose. That format was Perplexity's core contribution to the field, and everyone else has since copied it. The belief most readers arrive with is that Perplexity is a wrapper around Bing. That was substantially true once and it is out of date now, which makes it the most

Perplexity — SearchEngines.Net

You.com Thing

You.com launched in 2021 as a consumer search engine and was the first mainstream search product to put a conversational language model on its results page, three weeks after ChatGPT appeared. It no longer offers consumer search at all. The company runs its own crawler and index and sells access to them as an API to other software companies, and it is doing well at it — but there is no longer a You.com you can go and search.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You.com

This is the first thing to know and almost every listicle still gets it wrong. As of 19 August 2026, you.com presents no search box. The headline on the homepage reads "The Leading Web Search APIs for AI", the sub-head offers to "Search the web, extract clean content, and generate grounded answers for your Agents and LLMs", and the primary action on the page is obtaining a developer API key. The consumer search engine is gone. That is not the same thing as the company failing, and the distinction is the whole story of this entry. You.com, Inc. is

You.com — SearchEngines.Net

Microsoft Copilot Thing

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's consumer AI assistant, launched in February 2023 as Bing Chat. It operates no crawler and maintains no index. Instead it reformulates your question into a search query, sends that query to the Bing search service, and writes a cited answer over what Bing returns. The distinction that matters: the index it depends on belongs to Microsoft itself, not to a competitor.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Copilot

Microsoft Copilot has no web crawler. There is no CopilotBot. It maintains no index of its own, and it does not rank the web. Ask it a question and it does something quite specific: it reads your prompt, decides which parts would benefit from live web information, writes a search query of a few words, sends that query to the Bing search service , and composes a cited answer over whatever comes back. Microsoft describes this plainly in its own documentation, which is more than most of its competitors manage: Copilot "parses a user's prompt and identifies

Microsoft Copilot — SearchEngines.Net

Presearch Thing

Presearch is a search engine that pays users in PRE, an ERC-20 token, for searching. Queries are routed through tens of thousands of volunteer-run nodes that fetch results from other search engines and APIs. Since September 2025 the company has said it is building and running an independent index of its own; that claim has not been accompanied by any crawler documentation.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presearch_(search_engine)

Presearch is a crypto-incentivised search engine. You search, and you are paid in PRE , an ERC-20 token, for doing it. Behind the search box sits a network of volunteer-run nodes — ordinary computers running Presearch software — which take your query, fetch results from a range of search engines and APIs, and send them back; node operators are paid in PRE for the work. Advertisers do not bid cash for keywords, they stake PRE against them, and the largest stake takes the slot. The whole system is a token economy wrapped around a search box.

Presearch — SearchEngines.Net

Baidu Thing

Baidu is one of a handful of companies anywhere that crawls, indexes and ranks the open web with its own technology. It is also legally obliged to filter what it returns, and it does not tell users what has been removed. StatCounter measured it at 50.83% of Chinese search in July 2026, a figure that comes with serious methodological caveats.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu

Baidu is China's largest search engine and one of the very small number of organisations worldwide that crawls, indexes and ranks the open web entirely with its own technology. There is no partner feed. Nobody supplies Baidu's organic results, and nobody ever has. That is worth stating up front, because the most common English-language assumption about Baidu — that it is a localised copy of somebody else's search engine — is simply wrong. Baidu has crawled the Chinese web itself since 2001 and operates the full apparatus of an independent engine: a

Baidu — SearchEngines.Net

Yandex Thing

Yandex crawls the web with its own robots and ranks its own index, which puts it in a group of perhaps four to six genuinely independent web indexes worldwide. StatCounter measured it at 72.85% of Russian search in July 2026. Since 15 July 2024 it has been wholly Russian-owned; the former Dutch holding company kept the non-Russian businesses and renamed itself Nebius Group.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex_Search

Yandex is Russia's dominant search engine and the anchor of a large Russian internet group: search, maps, email, ride-hailing and delivery, a marketplace, music and video, a browser and a cloud business. On yandex.ru a search returns a portal-style page — web results alongside heavily integrated Yandex properties (Maps, Market, Music, the Alice assistant) and, increasingly, a generated answer at the top. Yandex crawls the web itself and ranks its own index — its own stored copy of the web, built by its own robots. No partner supplies its organic web

Yandex — SearchEngines.Net

Naver Thing

Naver runs its own crawler, Yeti, and its own index of the open web, and it does not resell Google's or Bing's results. What most of its results page shows, however, is content Naver itself hosts: Blog, Cafe, Knowledge iN, Shopping and Place. That is self-preferencing inside an own index, and it is why measurements of Naver's Korean market share differ by more than twenty points.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naver_(search_engine)

Naver is South Korea's home-grown search portal, and it is genuinely not a Google clone. It is closer to what the web looked like before Google won — deliberately, and successfully. Search naver.com and you get a stacked page of typed blocks: a generated AI briefing, then VIEW (blog and cafe posts), Knowledge iN answers, images, news, shopping listings, places on a map, and only then general web results. Naver does crawl the open web and does rank its own index. Its crawler is Yeti, it runs its own webmaster platform, and it does not resell Google's or

Naver — SearchEngines.Net

Seznam Thing

Seznam is the Czech Republic's home-grown portal and one of very few companies in the European Union that crawls and ranks its own index of the open web. It led Czech search until roughly 2011 and has lost share every year since: StatCounter measured it at 14.05% in July 2026 against Google's 81.07%. The company itself is not in decline; its search product is.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seznam.cz

Seznam — the word means "list" in Czech — is the Czech Republic's home-grown internet portal, and one of a small number of national search engines anywhere that beat Google at home for years before losing. It is a portal first and a search engine second: seznam.cz is a homepage of news, email, weather and TV listings linking to around thirty services, with a search box on top. Seznam crawls the open web itself and ranks its own fulltext index. No third party supplies its organic results; it is not a Bing or Google syndication customer. That makes it one

Seznam.cz — SearchEngines.Net

Sogou Thing

Sogou runs its own crawler and index over the Chinese web, but its English-language results have been served from Bing since a 2016 Microsoft partnership, and its two most distinctive verticals are licensed corpora rather than open-web crawl. That blend is why it is a hybrid rather than a fully independent index. Tencent took it private in September 2021 and has since built its AI search elsewhere.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogou

Sogou is China's third search engine — behind Baidu and, on most measures, behind Qihoo 360's Haosou — and is now best understood as a component of Tencent rather than a destination in its own right. It is also a hybrid. Sogou crawls the Chinese open web with its own spider and ranks its own index, recorded by Wikipedia at 10 billion pages as of 2017. But under a Microsoft partnership entered in May 2016, English-language results are served from Bing and machine-translated into Chinese, and the two verticals that made Sogou worth using are licensed

Sogou — SearchEngines.Net

Cốc Cốc Thing

Cốc Cốc is a Vietnamese search engine bundled with a Chromium-based browser of the same name, run by Cốc Cốc Company Ltd in Hanoi. It crawls the web with its own documented robot family, coccocbot, and ranks its own index — but that index is deliberately limited to Vietnamese-language and .vn content. As of July 2026 StatCounter put it second in Vietnam behind Google, on 3.38%.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%E1%BB%91c_C%E1%BB%91c

Cốc Cốc is a Vietnamese web search engine, and it is one of the small number of engines outside the United States, China and Russia that genuinely builds its own index — the engine's own stored copy of the web, assembled by a crawler it operates itself. Cốc Cốc's help documentation names the crawler family, publishes its user-agent strings, and states plainly that the robot discovers and downloads pages in order to include them in Cốc Cốc's search engine index. There is no documented partner feed from Google, Bing or anyone else. That is the answer to

Cốc Cốc — SearchEngines.Net

Rambler Thing

Rambler launched in 1996 as one of the first Russian-language search engines, a year before Yandex's public search launch. It abandoned its own crawler and index in June 2011 and has served Yandex results through the Yandex.XML results API ever since. The portal at rambler.ru is still busy and still Russian-market-relevant; the search engine behind it no longer exists.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambler_(portal)

The sentence most people need is this one: Rambler has not had a search engine of its own since 2011. On 23 June 2011 Yandex announced that Rambler's search services would be powered by Yandex's search engine and that Rambler would join the Yandex Ad Network. Rambler's crawler and index — the software that fetches pages and the stored copy of the web it builds — were retired. What remains in the search box at rambler.ru is a front end onto somebody else's results. Russian Wikipedia records the mechanism: Rambler search runs on Yandex.XML , Yandex's

Rambler — SearchEngines.Net

Dogpile Thing

Dogpile is a metasearch engine: one query goes out to several third-party search feeds and comes back as a single merged list. It has never operated a crawler or held an index. Launched in November 1996, it is now owned by InfoSpace Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of the advertising company System1, and was still live as of 19 August 2026.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogpile

Dogpile is a metasearch engine . You type one query; it sends that query to several other search engines' result feeds, merges what comes back, removes duplicates and shows you a single list. It has web, image, video, news and maps tabs, a dog mascot called Arfie, and a homepage tagline that reads "Searching the web since 1996." The defining fact about it, and the one most readers get wrong, is that Dogpile has never run a web crawler — the automated program an engine uses to fetch pages and build an index (its own stored copy of the web). There is no

Dogpile — SearchEngines.Net

Kiddle Thing

Kiddle is a child-facing front end to Google search: a Google Programmable Search Engine instance with SafeSearch on, plus Kiddle's own blocklists and a few hand-picked top results. It has no crawler and no index. It is not owned, operated or endorsed by Google, and its operator has never been publicly identified.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiddle_(search_engine)

Kiddle is a filtered front end to Google search, styled for children: large Arial type, big thumbnails, a cartoon robot mascot, and a results page arranged in safety tiers. It has web, "Facts", Images, "Kimages" and Spanish tabs, plus a companion children's encyclopedia, Kpedia , at kids.kiddle.co. Underneath, it is a Google Programmable Search Engine instance — the product formerly called Google Custom Search, which lets anyone build a search box over Google's index with their own restrictions applied — with Google SafeSearch enabled, plus Kiddle's own

Kiddle — SearchEngines.Net

Wolfram Alpha Thing

Wolfram|Alpha answers questions by computing, not by searching. It operates no crawler and holds no index of the web; instead it parses a question, pulls values from data Wolfram curates in advance, and calculates a result. That makes it superb at mathematics and cross-domain quantitative questions, and completely unable to find a news story, a forum thread or a company's homepage.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha

Every other engine in this directory can be placed on one axis: does it crawl the web itself, blend its crawl with a partner's, or resell somebody else's results? Wolfram|Alpha sits off that axis entirely. It has no crawler . It has no index of the web — no stored copy of pages, no ranking of documents. It also buys no results from anyone: nothing in what it shows you comes from Google, Bing or any other engine. Wolfram says so on its own about page. Wolfram|Alpha answers questions, in its words, "not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic

Wolfram Alpha — SearchEngines.Net

Ask.com Thing

Ask.com launched in 1997 as Ask Jeeves, a natural-language question-answering service. It ran its own crawler and index from 2001 until late 2010, then served third-party results for sixteen years. IAC discontinued its search business and Ask.com closed on 1 May 2026; the domain now serves only a farewell page.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

Ask.com shut down on 1 May 2026. This page exists in large part to say so, because a great deal of writing about search engines has not caught up, and "alternative search engines to try" lists still name it. A direct check of ask.com on 19 August 2026 found no search box. The domain serves a single sunset page: the Ask.com logo, the line "Every great search must come to an end," a short farewell, a privacy-policy link, and the notice "© 2026 IAC Inc. All rights reserved." That is the whole page. It is not a search engine, not a content portal, not a

Ask.com — SearchEngines.Net

AltaVista Thing

AltaVista was the first fast, full-text, web-scale search engine, launched by Digital Equipment Corporation in December 1995 and shut down by Yahoo on 8 July 2013. Nothing of the original service remains: altavista.com resolves, but it hands you to Yahoo Search, which serves Microsoft Bing's results. Its historical importance is real; its usefulness today is nil.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

AltaVista is not a search engine you can use. Yahoo announced its closure on 28 June 2013 and shut it down on 8 July 2013, pointing the domain at Yahoo Search. There is no AltaVista index, no AltaVista crawler, and no AltaVista result set anywhere on the web today. That is what the Discontinued verdict at the top of this page means, and it is not a soft judgement about a service in decline — the product does not exist. The closure was less dramatic than it sounds, because by 2013 AltaVista had already stopped being an independent engine. After Overture

AltaVista — SearchEngines.Net

Excite Thing

Excite is still online as of 19 August 2026, which surprises people who assume it died with the dot-com crash. It is not a search engine, though: it has no crawler and no index, and its own privacy policy states that search is provided by System1 LLC. The site is a legacy-brand portal operated by IAC's Ask Media Group.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite_(web_portal)

Excite.com is live. Checked on 19 August 2026, it loads a retro-styled portal page with a working search box, a link rail for weather, horoscopes and games, outbound links to services like Google Mail and ESPN, and a row of affiliate tiles. If you remember Excite from the 1990s and assumed it vanished with the dot-com crash, the site itself is the surprise: it never went away. What did go away is the search engine. Excite has no crawler (the automated program that fetches pages) and no index (the engine's own stored copy of the web). Its results come

Excite — SearchEngines.Net

Lycos Thing

Lycos is one of the oldest names in web search — a Carnegie Mellon crawler from 1994 — and it is still online as of 19 August 2026. It has not run its own crawler since autumn 2001, so the search box on lycos.com serves another engine's results. Lycos has never published a current statement of who supplies them.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos

Lycos.com is live. Checked on 19 August 2026, it loads a working portal with a functioning search box. People are often surprised by this, because Lycos belongs so completely to the 1990s in memory that its survival reads as an error. It is not defunct; it is hollowed out, which is a different condition and a more interesting one. What Lycos no longer has is a crawler (the automated program that fetches pages) or an index (the engine's own stored copy of the web). It retired its own spider in autumn 2001 and began serving results from FAST, the engine

Lycos — SearchEngines.Net

Infoseek Thing

Infoseek was a mid-1990s US search engine that ran its own crawler and index, was bought by Disney in stages, and was shut down when Disney announced the closure of GO.com and its search engine on 29 January 2001. Its crawler last ran that same month. The infoseek.com domain now redirects to go.com, a Disney brand directory with no search function.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infoseek

Infoseek does not exist. Its crawler ran for the last time in January 2001 , and on 29 January 2001 The Walt Disney Company announced that it would discontinue the operation of its GO.com portal and the search engine within it. That date comes from Disney's own filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which is why this page uses it rather than the February 2001 date that circulates elsewhere; where a primary corporate filing and a secondary summary disagree, the filing wins. The filing puts numbers on the closure. Roughly 400 employees

Infoseek — SearchEngines.Net

WebCrawler Thing

WebCrawler went live on 21 April 1994 and was the first web search engine to index the full text of the pages it found, rather than just their titles, URLs or human-written descriptions. It stopped using its own index in 2001. The site is still online in August 2026, owned by the advertising company System1 through its InfoSpace Holdings subsidiary, and serves results bought from outside suppliers alongside paid listings.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebCrawler

WebCrawler is a search website owned by System1, Inc. , an American advertising company, and operated through its subsidiary InfoSpace Holdings LLC. Type a query and you get a results page that merges listings drawn from outside search feeds with paid listings, under tabs for web, images, video and news. What you do not get is anything WebCrawler found for itself. That is what the verdict at the top of this page means. WebCrawler has not run a crawler — the automated program that fetches pages so an engine can store and rank them — or maintained an

WebCrawler — SearchEngines.Net

MetaCrawler Thing

MetaCrawler began in 1994 as a University of Washington research project and launched publicly on 7 July 1995. It queries other search services in parallel and merges their results; it has never operated a crawler or held an index of its own. Today it is owned by InfoSpace Holdings LLC, a subsidiary of the advertising company System1.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaCrawler

MetaCrawler is a metasearch engine : it sends your query to other search services and returns a merged list of what they send back. It does not crawl. It does not hold an index — an engine's own stored copy of the web, built by its own crawler. There is no MetaCrawler bot and no MetaCrawler user-agent, because there is nothing for one to fetch. This is not decline; it is design. The 1995 paper that introduced MetaCrawler describes the system as one that "posts the query to multiple search services in parallel, collates the returned references" — the

MetaCrawler — SearchEngines.Net

HotBot Thing

HotBot was the search front-end Wired magazine built in 1996 to showcase Inktomi's clustered search technology — the brand was never the engine. Lycos sold the domain in 2016, and hotbot.com today is an unrelated AI chat gateway run by an Ontario-governed company. It has no crawler and no index.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot

hotbot.com is live and actively developed as of 19 August 2026 — and it is not a search engine. The site presents itself as "AI made simple", offering free access to what it describes as more than 25 AI models, naming ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini among them, reached through official APIs and without creating an account. There is an accompanying iOS app. This is an AI chat gateway wearing a 1990s search brand. There is no continuity of ownership, technology or personnel with the search engine that launched in 1996. The current operator is Hotbot Services

HotBot — SearchEngines.Net

Magellan Thing

Magellan was a mid-1990s web directory whose editors wrote reviews of sites and rated them from one to four stars, alongside a larger database of unreviewed sites. Excite acquired its owner, the McKinley Group, in June 1996 and progressively folded it into Excite's own service. The search engine was shut down in May 2001 and nothing of it survives beyond archived snapshots.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite_(web_portal)

Magellan — full name the Magellan Internet Guide , earlier the Magellan On-Line Guide — has not existed since May 2001 , when Excite shut it down. It cannot be used, and there is no successor service carrying the name. While it was alive, the fact worth understanding is that Magellan was not primarily a crawler-based search engine in the way AltaVista was. It was an edited directory : human reviewers looked at websites, wrote a description of each one, and rated it from one to four stars. Those reviews were the product. Sitting behind them was a second,

Magellan — SearchEngines.Net

LookSmart Thing

LookSmart was a categorised web directory compiled by paid editors rather than by a crawler, and its real business was wholesaling that directory to portals — above all Microsoft's MSN. It owned a genuine crawler-based index only between 2002 and 2007, through its acquisition of WiseNut, and closed it on exiting consumer products. The company still exists as a corporate entity, but there has been no LookSmart search engine for nearly two decades.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LookSmart

Calling LookSmart a search engine is a category error for most of its life. It was a human-compiled web directory — a categorised catalogue built by paid editors, and for a time by volunteers through its Zeal property — with no crawler of its own. Nothing on it was discovered by software. Sites were submitted, reviewed by a person, and filed into a subject hierarchy. Its actual business was stranger and, for a while, cleverer than running a destination website. LookSmart wholesaled the directory to other people's portals . If you used Microsoft's MSN

LookSmart — SearchEngines.Net

SavvySearch Thing

SavvySearch was a metasearch engine: it held no crawler and no index, and answered each query by dispatching it to a dozen or more other search engines and merging what came back. Its distinguishing idea was that it learned from usage which back-end engines were worth asking for which kinds of query — research published in AI Magazine in 1997. CNET bought it in October 1999 and folded it into Search.com, and the brand did not survive.

SavvySearch never had an index of its own. It was a metasearch engine : you typed one query, and it fired that query at a dozen or more other search engines at the same time, then merged and de-duplicated what came back into a single list. It owned the dispatcher, the ranking logic and the interface, and nothing else. Every result on the page had been found by someone else's crawler. That is a neutral structural fact rather than a criticism. In 1995 it was arguably the best available answer to a real problem: no single engine indexed more than a

SavvySearch — SearchEngines.Net

ProFusion Thing

ProFusion was a metasearch engine created as academic research at the University of Kansas: it had no crawler and no index, and answered queries by dispatching them to several other search engines, removing duplicates and merging the results into one ranking. Its distinctive method was to classify each query into a subject category first, then query the engines that had tested best for that category. Intelliseek bought it in 2000 and rebuilt it as a gateway to the "Invisible Web"; it has not operated for roughly two decades.

ProFusion had no crawler and no index. It was a metasearch engine : one query in, dispatched in parallel to several underlying search engines, duplicates stripped out, and a single merged ranking returned. Everything it showed had been found by somebody else's index. As a structural description that is neutral — it is what the product was designed to be — but it does mean ProFusion never owned anything about the web itself. What makes it worth a page is where it came from. ProFusion was academic research first , built at the University of Kansas and

ProFusion — SearchEngines.Net

Mamma Thing

Mamma.com launched in Montreal in July 1996 as one of the first metasearch engines, marketed for years as "the Mother of All Search Engines." It never had a crawler of its own. The domain is still live and commercially active in 2026 — as an affiliate content site with no search box, no query interface and no results.

Most entries marked as no longer available on this site are dead in the ordinary way: the servers were switched off and the domain lapsed or redirects somewhere else. Mamma is not that, and the difference is the whole reason this page exists. mamma.com is live, commercially active and making money. It simply is not a search engine any more. Checked directly on 19 August 2026: the homepage loads, and there is no search box. The path /search?q=… does not return search results either — it returns the content site. There is no query interface anywhere on

Mamma.com — SearchEngines.Net

Northern Light Thing

From 1997 to 2002 Northern Light was one of the most distinctive public search engines: it crawled the open web with its own crawler and searched a licensed collection of premium journals and reports alongside it, selling individual articles for a small fee. It withdrew the free consumer engine in January 2002. The company itself is alive and employee-owned, selling an enterprise market-intelligence platform called SinglePoint.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Light_Group

Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing, and getting one of them wrong is the single most common error made about Northern Light. The public web search engine was withdrawn in January 2002 . It does not exist, it has no successor, and nobody can search the open web with it. That is why this entry is classified as no longer available: any page listing Northern Light among live search alternatives is describing something that ended nearly a quarter of a century ago. The company, however, never went out of business . Northern Light Group, LLC

Northern Light — SearchEngines.Net

Inference Find Thing

Inference Find was an American metasearch engine that fired a query at six of the big engines of the day, merged and de-duplicated the answers, and grouped them into clusters rather than presenting a flat ranked list. It never ran a crawler of its own. Spun out of the AI software company Inference Corporation in February 2000 as InFind, it closed in March 2001 having run out of capital.

Inference Find was an American metasearch engine of the late 1990s. A metasearch engine has no index of its own — no crawler fetching pages, no stored copy of the web to rank. It takes your query, sends it to several real search engines at once, and assembles what comes back. Inference Find sent queries to Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Infoseek and Excite , merged the responses, stripped duplicates, and displayed a single list. It is listed here as no longer available, and that is settled. Search Engine Watch reported on 7 March 2001 that

Inference Find — SearchEngines.Net

Highway 61 Thing

Highway 61 was a mid-to-late-1990s metasearch engine: one search box that broadcast a query to Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrawler, Infoseek and Excite, then ranked the answers by how many of those engines had returned them. It had no crawler and no index of its own. Who operated it, when it launched and when it stopped are all unknown - no source records any of it.

Highway 61 was a metasearch engine of the mid-to-late 1990s: a single search box that broadcast a query to several of the big engines of the day and assembled the answers on one page. It had no crawler and no index of its own — no software fetching pages, no stored copy of the web to rank. Every result came from somebody else's engine, queried live. Contemporaneous listings give its back-end set as Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrawler, Infoseek and Excite, with one noting that it "used to search AltaVista as well", so the mix changed over time. It is listed

Highway 61 — SearchEngines.Net

EuroSeek Thing

EuroSeek was a Stockholm-based search engine that ran its own crawler and index of European web content from March 1997, searching across 19 languages and 18 countries at launch. It supplied results to Microsoft's Nordic MSN portals before EuroSeek AB collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001. The euroseek.com domain is live today, but what it serves is a submission-based web directory of unidentified ownership, not a search engine.

EuroSeek was a Stockholm-based web search engine built around one proposition: that Europe needed an engine that understood European languages and European websites, rather than an American engine with a European front page. It launched in the week of 10 March 1997 covering 19 languages across 18 countries , and it did the work itself — its own crawler, its own index (the engine's stored copy of the web), its own ranking. A user could restrict a search by country and by language at a time when US engines treated Europe as an afterthought. By

EuroSeek — SearchEngines.Net

Jayde Thing

Jayde.com is a business-to-business web directory with a search interface over it, operated from Lexington, Kentucky and still running as of 19 August 2026. Its index contains only sites whose owners submitted them, proved ownership and passed human review - there is no crawl of the open web - and results are ordered by how often listings are clicked. It calls itself a search engine; it is more accurately a curated business listing service.

Jayde.com is a business-to-business web directory with a search box on top of it, and it is still running: the site was live with a current copyright notice when checked on 19 August 2026. A visitor gets a category tree of industry sectors — Aerospace, Automotive, Energy and so on — and a search field that queries a database of business websites. It describes itself as "the Premier Business to Business Search Engine" and "the internet's largest B2B Search Engine". The verdict on this page is not a web index , and the reason is worth spelling

Jayde — SearchEngines.Net

Cuil Thing

Cuil (pronounced "cool") was a web search engine launched on 28 July 2008 by former Google search engineers, built on its own crawler and its own index rather than a licensed feed. It led its launch with a claim of roughly 120 billion indexed pages, was widely panned on result quality within 48 hours, and shut down on 17 September 2010. As of 19 August 2026 cuil.com does not resolve at all.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuil

Cuil was an independent web search engine that operated from 28 July 2008 to 17 September 2010. It is listed here as no longer available in the fullest sense of that phrase: the company shut down, and as of 19 August 2026 the domain cuil.com does not resolve at all. A DNS lookup fails outright. It is not parked, not redirected, and not serving a holding page. Of all the discontinued engines documented on this site, Cuil is the cleanest disappearance. The single most common thing said about Cuil is that it was a fake — a search engine that claimed

Cuil — SearchEngines.Net

Gigablast Thing

Gigablast was an independent web search engine written from scratch in C and C++ by Matt Wells, with its own Gigabot crawler and its own index and no partner feed at any point. It ran from its public beta on 21 July 2002 until gigablast.com stopped serving search in early April 2023. Residual Gigablast-branded pages still resolve as of 19 August 2026, but there is no evidence the index is being crawled or served.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigablast

Gigablast was an independent web search engine written from scratch in C and C++ by one person, Matt Wells, and operated from its public beta in July 2002 until it silently went dark in early April 2023. Its significance is wildly disproportionate to its traffic. For twenty-one years it was one of a genuinely tiny number of organisations anywhere — perhaps half a dozen worldwide — that crawled the open web at scale and ranked its own index (the engine's own stored copy of the web, built by its own crawler) rather than reselling Google's or

Gigablast — SearchEngines.Net

Neeva Thing

Neeva was an ad-free, tracker-free web search engine funded by subscriptions rather than advertising, founded in 2019 by two former senior Google people and launched publicly in the United States on 29 June 2021. It ran its own crawler and index while also blending in Microsoft Bing and named vertical partners. Consumer search shut down on 2 June 2023, and Snowflake acquired the company that month.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neeva

Neeva was an ad-free, tracker-free web search engine that you paid for. It was founded in 2019 by Sridhar Ramaswamy , who had run Google's advertising business for years, and Vivek Raghunathan , formerly of YouTube. Its founding argument was structural rather than moral: ad-funded search is compromised because the entity ranking the results is paid by the entity that wants to be ranked. Neeva's answer was to remove the advertiser from the transaction entirely and charge the user instead. The consumer search engine shut down on 2 June 2023 , and this

Neeva — SearchEngines.Net

GoTo.com / Overture Thing

GoTo.com, renamed Overture Services in 2001, invented paid search as it exists today: an open auction in which advertisers bid for placement against a keyword and pay only when someone clicks. Its own results were the paid listings; unpaid algorithmic results were licensed from Inktomi from June 1998. Yahoo completed its acquisition on 7 October 2003 and retired the Overture brand on 18 April 2005.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoTo.com

GoTo.com was the search engine that invented paid search as everyone now knows it: an open auction in which advertisers bid for placement against a keyword and pay only when someone clicks . Bill Gross, whose Pasadena incubator Idealab spun the company out, presented the idea at TED in February 1998 to an audience reported as confused and in places actively hostile. His argument was that a search engine's ranking could be sold transparently rather than editorialised, and that charging per click rather than per impression aligned what the advertiser paid

GoTo.com / Overture — SearchEngines.Net

Ask Jeeves Thing

Ask Jeeves was the search engine you asked a question in ordinary English, answered in the persona of Jeeves, a cartoon valet. It launched on 1 June 1997 with no index of its own, acquired the Teoma crawler and ranking algorithm in 2001, and ran a genuinely independent search engine until late 2010. The Jeeves name was retired in 2016, and the successor site Ask.com closed on 1 May 2026.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com

Ask Jeeves was the search engine you asked a question , in ordinary English — "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?" rather than eiffel tower height — and which answered in the persona of Jeeves , a cartoon valet borrowed from P. G. Wodehouse. It launched on 1 June 1997, floated on NASDAQ in 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom, bought the Teoma ranking technology in 2001, and spent most of the 2000s as a real, independent, crawling search engine with a genuinely distinctive algorithm. Three different endings get merged into one in most accounts,

Ask Jeeves — SearchEngines.Net

Archie Thing

Archie was a searchable catalogue of the files held on public anonymous-FTP servers, built at McGill University in Montreal by Alan Emtage with Bill Heelan and Peter J. Deutsch. It indexed filenames and directory paths only — never the contents of files, and never web pages, because the public World Wide Web did not yet exist. It is the strongest single claimant to the title of first internet search engine, and it is not a web search engine.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_(search_engine)

Archie was a searchable catalogue of the files sitting on public anonymous-FTP servers — the machines that, before the web, held nearly everything the internet had to offer in the way of software, documents and data. You gave Archie a filename or a fragment of one, and it told you which hosts held a file of that name and in which directory. That was the whole product. Archie indexed file listings, not document content. This is the single fact most often got wrong about it, and it is worth stating flatly. Archie read nothing inside the files it

Archie — SearchEngines.Net

ALIWEB Thing

ALIWEB — “Archie-Like Indexing in the WEB” — was an early searchable directory of web resources built by Martijn Koster at Nexor in Nottingham. It had no crawler by design: site owners wrote a small structured index file describing their own pages and registered it, and ALIWEB merged those submissions into one searchable database. It is often called the first internet search engine, including in Wikipedia's opening sentence, and that is wrong.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALIWEB

ALIWEB was an early searchable directory of web resources assembled entirely out of descriptions that site owners wrote about themselves. A webmaster created a small structured text file on their own server — conventionally site.idx — listing each resource with a title, a description, keywords and a URI, then registered the location of that file with ALIWEB through a form. ALIWEB fetched the registered index files on a schedule, merged them, and let people search the result. What you got back was therefore a list of self-described sites, not an index of

ALIWEB — SearchEngines.Net

AllTheWeb Thing

AllTheWeb was a general-purpose crawler-based search engine built by the Norwegian company Fast Search & Transfer, launched in mid-1999. For a few years around 2002–03 it was Google's main technical rival on index size and crawl freshness. Its independent index ended around 2003–04, after Yahoo acquired it via Overture; the brand itself survived until 4 April 2011.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlltheWeb

AllTheWeb — originally FAST Search, at fast.no before alltheweb.com — was a general-purpose, crawler-based web search engine built by the Norwegian company Fast Search & Transfer. It ran its own crawler and its own index: its own stored copy of the web, built by software that fetched pages itself rather than relying on anyone else's data. For a period around 2002–03 it was the main technical rival to Google on index size and crawl freshness, and heavy searchers liked it for its speed, its advanced query syntax and its early image, video, audio, FTP

AllTheWeb — SearchEngines.Net

DMOZ / Open Directory Thing

DMOZ — the Open Directory Project, named for directory.mozilla.org — was the largest human-edited catalogue of the web. Volunteers decided which sites deserved a listing and wrote a one-line description for each; there was never a crawler and never an index of page text. It closed on 17 March 2017, but because its data was Creative Commons licensed from 2011, the corpus survived it.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

This is the central correction, and everything else about DMOZ follows from it. The Open Directory Project never ran a crawler, never indexed the text of a page, and never ranked anything by relevance to a query. It was a catalogue: volunteers decided which sites deserved a listing in a given subject category, wrote a one-line human description for each, and filed them into a hierarchy — Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health, Home, News, Recreation, Reference, Science, Shopping, Society, Sports, plus World for material not in English. What you got

DMOZ (Open Directory Project) — SearchEngines.Net

Teoma Thing

Teoma was an American web search engine, spun out of Rutgers University research, that crawled and indexed the web itself between 2001 and 2006. Its ranking method - Subject-Specific Popularity - counted link votes only from pages inside the query's own topical community, a deliberate departure from Google's whole-web PageRank. Ask Jeeves bought it in 2001 and made it the engine behind Ask.com; the Teoma brand was retired in 2006 and teoma.com no longer resolves.

sameAs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teoma

Teoma was an American web search engine that ran its own crawler and its own index — the engine's stored copy of the web, built by software that follows links and fetches pages. It operated under its own brand from a public beta in April 2001 until February 2006. That independence is why it matters. In the early 2000s only a short list of Western engines actually crawled and ranked the web themselves: Google, Inktomi, AlltheWeb/FAST, AltaVista and Teoma. Almost everything else was re-serving results bought from one of them. The verdict at the top

Teoma — SearchEngines.Net

Major global search engines Taxonomy

Major global search engines covered by SearchEngines.Net.

There are far fewer global search engines than there are global search brands, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole subject of this page. To qualify as a genuinely global general engine, a service has to do three hard things at once. It has to crawl the open web continuously in every major language, because an index that stops being refreshed is out of date within weeks. It has to store and serve that index at a scale measured in hundreds of billions of pages. And it has to rank it well enough that ordinary people keep using it, in markets

Major global search engines — SearchEngines.Net

Privacy-focused search engines Taxonomy

Privacy-focused search engines covered by SearchEngines.Net.

"Private search engine" is not one claim. It is at least three, they are independent of each other, and an engine can satisfy any one of them while failing the others. Reading this category usefully means separating them before you look at a single logo. The three questions that "private" can answer Does the operator record what you searched and link it to you? This is the promise most privacy engines lead with: no query logs tied to an IP address or an account, no behavioural profile, no personalised results, no tracking cookies. It is a promise about

Privacy-focused search engines — SearchEngines.Net

AI-native search engines Taxonomy

AI-native search engines covered by SearchEngines.Net.

An AI search engine is not a model that has memorised the web. It is a retrieval system with a writer bolted to the front. Understanding that order — retrieve first, generate second — explains almost everything about how these products behave, including what they get wrong. What actually happens when you ask one a question A language model's knowledge is frozen at the point its training finished, and it has no way to check anything. To answer a question about the world as it is now, the product has to go and get pages. The sequence is roughly: the

AI-native search engines — SearchEngines.Net

Regional and international search engines Taxonomy

Regional and international search engines covered by SearchEngines.Net.

Almost every country in the world uses Google. A small number do not, or do not exclusively, and the exceptions are not random. Each one can be traced to some combination of four causes: a language that was genuinely hard for early Western engines to handle, a domestic incumbent that arrived before Google localised, a portal business that keeps users inside its own services, and state or trade policy that removed the alternative. Where all four have been present, a national engine has survived. Where none were, the market went to Google and stayed

Regional and international search engines — SearchEngines.Net

Meta-search engines Taxonomy

Meta-search engines covered by SearchEngines.Net.

A meta-search engine holds no index. It has never crawled a page. When you press enter it sends your query out to other engines, waits for their answers, merges and de-duplicates them, and shows you one combined list. Every result you see originated somewhere else, and was retrieved in the second or two you spent waiting. Why that was a genuinely good idea in 1995 In the middle of the 1990s no search engine had indexed most of the web, and the ones that existed had indexed different parts of it. Crawlers started from different seed lists, followed

Meta-search engines — SearchEngines.Net

Legacy engines still online Taxonomy

Legacy engines still online covered by SearchEngines.Net.

Excite, Lycos and HotBot are all online right now. All three load, two of them still have a working search box, and none of them has operated a web crawler since the early 2000s. They are not defunct and they are not search engines. They are domain names with commercial value, running somebody else's technology behind a familiar logo — which is a distinct and under-documented way for a search engine to end. The pattern A 1990s search brand is worth something long after its engine is worthless. The domain still receives type-in traffic and links

Legacy engines still online — SearchEngines.Net

Search engines you can no longer use Taxonomy

Search engines you can no longer use covered by SearchEngines.Net.

Twenty-three engines here no longer work. Some were shut down on an announced date; some went dark without a word; some still resolve as domains with no search function behind them. Together they show something more useful than a set of obituaries: search engines die in a small number of recognisable ways, and almost none involve losing on the merits. The underlying economics An index is not an asset that keeps working. It is a subscription. The crawl must run continuously or the index decays within weeks, and the bill — servers, bandwidth, storage,

Search engines you can no longer use — SearchEngines.Net

How search engines work Concept

Crawling, indexing, ranking and serving, explained with real engines: Googlebot, bingbot, MojeekBot and the handful of organisations that do all four.

The single most useful thing to understand about search is that a search engine does not search the internet when you type a query. It searches its own index — a stored, pre-processed copy of the pages it has already visited, held on its own servers. Your query never travels out across the web: it goes to one company's data centre, is matched against that company's copy of the web, and comes back ordered by that company's judgement about which pages are worth showing first. That is why two search engines can return completely different answers to the

How search engines work — SearchEngines.Net

The history of search engines Concept

From Archie in 1990 to AI answers in 2026: who was first, what killed AltaVista and Lycos, and how search consolidated into two Western indexes.

The first internet search engine predates the public World Wide Web. Archie went live on 10 September 1990, written at McGill University in Montreal by Alan Emtage with Bill Heelan and Peter J. Deutsch. It catalogued the filenames held on public anonymous-FTP servers: you gave it a name or part of one and it told you which hosts had a file called that, and where. It read nothing inside those files, ranked nothing and summarised nothing — you had to know roughly what the thing you wanted was called. Sources disagree on the year: McGill and the Internet

The history of search engines — SearchEngines.Net

Choosing a search engine Concept

Most search engines other than Google resell Bing. Which ones run their own index, which are hybrids, and how to tell before you change your default.

Search engines are usually compared on what you can see: the look of the results page, the privacy policy, whether there is an AI summary, whether it plants trees. Those are real differences. None is the important one. The important one is invisible from the results page: where did these links come from? Every search engine sits in one of three states, and which state it is in determines almost everything else about it. Own index. The engine runs its own crawler over the open web, stores its own copy, and ranks it. Google, Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Baidu,

Choosing a search engine — SearchEngines.Net

What is a search engine? Concept

A search engine crawls the web, stores what it finds in an index, and ranks that index against a query. Very few organisations actually do all three.

A search engine answers a question about the web by consulting a copy of the web it made earlier. That single sentence contains the whole architecture, and it is the reason search results appear in a fraction of a second rather than in the hours it would take to actually go and look. Three distinct systems have to work for it to be true. The first is the crawler — an automated program that fetches pages over ordinary HTTP, reads the links inside them, and queues those links to fetch next. Googlebot, bingbot, MojeekBot, Bravebot, SeznamBot, Baiduspider,

What is a search engine? — SearchEngines.Net

How search engine crawling works Concept

Crawlers fetch pages, extract links, and queue what they find. How Googlebot, bingbot, MojeekBot and the rest schedule, throttle and verify a crawl.

Crawling is the first of the three jobs a search engine does, and mechanically it is the simplest. A crawler holds a list of URLs it intends to fetch — conventionally called the frontier — takes one off, makes an ordinary HTTP request for it, stores the response, extracts every link in the returned HTML, and adds any URL it has not seen before back onto the frontier. Then it does it again. Forever. Everything difficult about crawling is a consequence of running that loop billions of times against servers that did not consent to it in advance and cannot

How search engine crawling works — SearchEngines.Net

How search engine indexing works Concept

An index is the web turned inside out: word to document, not document to word. How engines parse, select, store and shard what their crawlers fetch.

When a search engine returns results in under a second, it is not looking at the web. It is looking at a structure it built earlier from a crawl, and the shape of that structure is the reason the operation is fast. A crawled page is a document that contains words. That is the wrong way round for searching. Scanning several hundred billion documents for a word, on demand, is not tractable at any price. So the indexer inverts the relationship and stores, for each distinct word, the list of documents containing it. This is the inverted index , and it has

How search engine indexing works — SearchEngines.Net

How search ranking works Concept

Retrieval finds the candidates; ranking decides the order. From term frequency to PageRank to learned rerankers, and why engines disagree so much.

A query against a web-scale index does not return twenty documents. It returns millions. The interesting work is not finding matches — the inverted index does that almost instantly — but deciding which handful of them a person sees, and in what order. Practically every modern engine splits this into two stages. Retrieval pulls a candidate set out of the index cheaply, using methods fast enough to run over the whole corpus. Ranking then applies far more expensive scoring to that much smaller set, because you can afford computation on ten thousand

How search ranking works — SearchEngines.Net

What is a web crawler? Concept

A crawler is a program that fetches pages and follows links. The real named crawlers, what each is for, and how to tell a genuine one from a forgery.

A web crawler is a program that fetches a page over HTTP, extracts the links inside it, and goes on to fetch those. That is the whole definition. Everything else — search indexes, web archives, AI training corpora, broken-link reports — is built on top of that one behaviour. It is called several things, and the names are interchangeable rather than technical. Crawler is the plain description. Spider is the metaphor from crawling a web, and was the dominant term in the 1990s. Robot is the oldest usage: the earliest such program, Matthew Gray's World Wide

What is a web crawler? — SearchEngines.Net

Robots.txt and crawler control Concept

Robots.txt is a voluntary request, not a lock. Its 1994 origins, how RFC 9309 defines it, what it controls, and how engines and AI crawlers treat it.

robots.txt is a plain text file served from one fixed location — the root of a host, at /robots.txt — that tells automated clients which parts of that host they are asked not to fetch. It is the oldest surviving web convention governing machine behaviour rather than human behaviour, and its most important property belongs in the first sentence of any honest description of it: it is a request . Nothing enforces it. A crawler that ignores robots.txt receives exactly the same responses as one that reads it. The file is not access control, authenticates

Robots.txt and crawler control — SearchEngines.Net

How search engines handle duplicate pages Concept

Most of the web is a copy of itself. How crawlers detect exact and near-duplicate pages, cluster them, and pick one canonical URL to keep.

When Google published a count of the web in July 2008, it said its systems had seen 1 trillion unique URLs at once. The interesting part was not the number but the caveat attached to it: not all of those URLs lead to unique web pages. In Google's words, "many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other." The same post noted that the first Google index in 1998 held 26 million pages, and that the index passed one billion pages in 2000. That gap — between how many addresses exist and how many

How search engines handle duplicate pages — SearchEngines.Net

How big are search engine indexes? Concept

Published index sizes are marketing, not measurement. What Google, Mojeek, Marginalia and Cuil have claimed, and why nobody can audit an index.

This is a question with a large amount of confident-looking information behind it and almost no verifiable information behind it. Search engines are not audited on index size. No regulator requires the disclosure, no accounting standard defines the unit, and no external party has a mechanism to check a figure once it is published. Every number in circulation is a company describing itself. That does not make the numbers worthless — a dated, self-published figure from an operator with a track record is real evidence about that operator. It makes them a

How big are search engine indexes? — SearchEngines.Net

What is a SERP? Concept

A SERP is the page a search engine returns for a query. What is on it, how organic and paid results differ, and why no two people see the same one.

A SERP is a search engine results page — the page an engine returns in response to a query. The acronym is industry shorthand that leaked into general use; the plural, unhelpfully, is "SERPs", which people also use to mean rankings in general. The most important thing about a SERP is the thing the name obscures. It is not a document sitting on a server waiting to be fetched. It is assembled on demand , in a fraction of a second, out of an index, a ranking function, an advertising auction, a set of feature modules, and a handful of facts about you — your

What is a SERP? — SearchEngines.Net

SERP features explained Concept

Answer boxes, People Also Ask, knowledge panels, AI Overviews and more. What each feature is, where it comes from, and how often they actually appear.

A SERP feature is anything on a search engine results page that is not a plain organic listing — the classic title, URL and snippet — and not a plain text advertisement. Everything else is a feature: the boxed answer at the top, the accordion of related questions, the strip of images, the panel of facts about a person or company down the right-hand side, the map with three local businesses on it, the AI-written summary above all of it. The term is jargon, but the thing it names is the single biggest change in what a results page is . A page of ten links

SERP features explained — SearchEngines.Net

How search engines make money Concept

Advertising, subscription, API metering, affiliate commissions and mission funding: the five business models behind web search, and what each one does.

Search is expensive. Crawling the web, storing an index, and answering queries in a fraction of a second are all capital-intensive, and the bill arrives whether or not anyone clicks anything. Every engine therefore runs on at least one of five structural models: Advertising — selling placement against the query, at auction. Subscription — the searcher pays directly, and there is no advertiser. Metered API access — selling the index wholesale to developers and other products. Affiliate commissions — a share of transactions that begin with a search.

How search engines make money — SearchEngines.Net

How search autocomplete works Concept

Autocomplete predicts the query you are typing from what others have searched. How prefix matching works, why predictions differ, and what gets filtered.

Autocomplete predicts the rest of the query you have started typing. That sentence contains the two things people most often get wrong about it. First, it predicts a query , not an answer. The dropdown is guessing what you were about to type, not telling you what is true, popular, or worth reading. A prediction appearing under your cursor is a statement about how sentences that begin like yours have historically continued — nothing more. Second, it is a prediction rather than a suggestion, and engines are careful about the distinction for a reason that

How search autocomplete works — SearchEngines.Net

What was the first search engine? Concept

The first internet search engine was Archie, live 10 September 1990. The first full-text web search engine was WebCrawler, 21 April 1994. Every claim, dated.

The first internet search engine was Archie, which went live on 10 September 1990. The first search engine that indexed the full text of web pages — which is what almost everyone means by the phrase today — was WebCrawler , launched on 21 April 1994 by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington. Both are true at once because they answer different questions. Archie predates the public World Wide Web and never indexed a web page: it catalogued the filenames sitting on public FTP servers. WebCrawler was the first tool that would find a page because of

What was the first search engine? — SearchEngines.Net

The directory era of web search Concept

For a decade humans catalogued the web by hand. Yahoo, LookSmart, Magellan and DMOZ, what each actually did, and why editorial curation lost to crawlers.

For roughly a decade, the most useful way to find things on the web was not to search it but to browse a catalogue people had built by hand . A web directory listed sites, not pages, arranged into a subject hierarchy, each with a short description written by an editor. You did not type a query and get ranked matches; you walked down a tree — Recreation, then Outdoors, then Climbing — and read what was on the shelf. The distinction matters because the two get conflated constantly, including by people who lived through it. A search engine runs a crawler,

The directory era of web search — SearchEngines.Net

Google and PageRank Concept

PageRank explained: the 1998 Stanford paper, the random-surfer formula, what the score actually measured, and why the public toolbar number died in 2016.

PageRank scores a web page's importance using nothing but the links between pages. It ignores the words on the page entirely, and asks a question about the shape of the web itself: if somebody browsed the web forever by clicking links at random, occasionally getting bored and jumping to a completely random page, what proportion of their time would they spend on this particular page? That proportion is the page's PageRank. Two consequences follow, and almost every misunderstanding comes from missing one of them. PageRank is recursive . A link is not one

Google and PageRank — SearchEngines.Net

Search algorithm updates: a history Concept

Florida, Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, RankBrain, BERT and the modern core updates — what each one changed, and why they stopped having names.

The phrase "the algorithm" implies one program with one set of rules, periodically rewritten. That has not been true of any large search engine for a very long time, if it ever was. What exists is a stack of independent systems each contributing to a final ordering: text matching, link analysis, neural systems that map queries and documents into a shared representation, freshness scoring, locality, deduplication, site diversity limits, and a large body of spam detection running alongside all of it. An "update" is therefore a change to one of those

Search algorithm updates: a history — SearchEngines.Net

Search engines that no longer exist Concept

Which search engines are genuinely dead, which are only transformed, and which are just a domain someone else now owns — with dates and causes for each.

Most lists of "dead search engines" are wrong in the same way: they mix three different states together, and the difference between them is the only thing a reader actually needs. Genuinely gone. The service stopped answering queries and never came back. The domain may redirect, show a farewell page, or not resolve at all, but there is no search engine at the other end. AltaVista, Infoseek, Cuil, Neeva, DMOZ and — since 1 May 2026 — Ask.com are all in this category. Alive but transformed. The brand still has a website and sometimes a search box, but the

Search engines that no longer exist — SearchEngines.Net

A timeline of search engines, 1990 to 2026 Concept

Every major search engine launch, acquisition and shutdown from Archie in 1990 to Ask.com closing in May 2026 — dated, sourced, with the conflicts printed.

Search engine history is unusually badly dated, for three reasons that recur below. Companies and products have different birthdays : Excite's company was founded in June 1993 and its service launched in October 1995. Announcements and launches are different events : ALIWEB was announced in late 1993 and launched in May 1994. And brands outlive indexes — AllTheWeb stopped running its own index around 2003 but was not switched off until 2011, so one shutdown date describes the wrong thing. Where sources genuinely disagree, both dates are printed rather

A timeline of search engines, 1990 to 2026 — SearchEngines.Net

The search engine wars Concept

The portal era, the fight over who owned an index, and the paid-search auction GoTo.com invented in 1998 — how search consolidated into one company.

"The search engine wars" is usually told as one contest that Google won, which flattens a decade of separate fights into a single story. It is more useful as four overlapping conflicts, each with different combatants and different winners. The portal war , roughly 1996 to 2001, over the front page: whose site people opened first. Search was treated as a feature of a destination rather than as the product. The index war , roughly 1995 to 2004, over who actually crawled the web. Fewer companies were in this one than the brand names suggest, because most

The search engine wars — SearchEngines.Net

Own index vs resold results: who actually crawls the web Concept

Only about a dozen search engines crawl the web themselves. Here is which engines own an index, which resell Bing or Google, and why the difference matters.

Every search engine needs an index — its own stored, searchable copy of the web, assembled by a crawler (a program that fetches pages and follows the links out of them). Building one means running a crawler continuously against hundreds of millions or hundreds of billions of URLs, storing the text, and maintaining the machinery that ranks it. It is the single most expensive thing a search engine does, and it is the only part a company cannot fake. Most of the search engines you have heard of do not do it. They buy finished results from someone who does,

Own index vs resold results: who actually crawls the web — SearchEngines.Net

Search engines other than Google Concept

A structural guide to the alternatives: which engines run a different index, which resell Bing or Google, which dominate outside the West, and what you lose.

People leave Google for four quite different reasons, and each has a different answer. Confusing them is why so many people switch, feel underwhelmed, and switch back within a fortnight. You object to being tracked. You want mainstream-quality results without a profile being built. The answer is a privacy front end over Google or Bing. You object to the results page itself — the ads, the AI summary, the Google-owned modules pushing links below the fold. The answer is a cleaner interface, which may still be Google's or Bing's results underneath. You want

Search engines other than Google — SearchEngines.Net

Private search engines compared Concept

Who receives your query, which jurisdiction holds it, and which privacy claims are actually verified — DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Brave, Mojeek and the rest.

Almost every private search engine says the same four things: no tracking, no profiling, no logs tied to you, no selling your data. Those statements are close to unfalsifiable from the outside. What is checkable is the architecture around them, and it varies enormously between engines that make identical promises. Four questions do most of the work. Who else receives your query? An engine with its own index — its own crawled copy of the web — can answer you without telling anyone. An engine without one has to forward your query to whoever supplies its

Private search engines compared — SearchEngines.Net

Search engines that don't use AI Concept

Which search engines have no AI answers, which let you switch them off, and how to get plain links back on Google. Checked August 2026, honestly.

This is the question that makes the whole subject confusing, and almost nobody separates the four meanings. They have completely different answers. No AI-generated answer above the results. You want a page of links, not a paragraph written by a language model. This is what most people mean, and it is achievable. No machine learning anywhere in ranking. Effectively nobody can offer this and almost nobody is claiming to. Machine-learned ranking long predates the generative era — Yandex announced its MatrixNet ranking system in 2009 — and an engine that

Search engines that don't use AI — SearchEngines.Net

Unbiased search engines: what is actually possible Concept

No search engine is neutral — ranking is a value judgement. But personalisation, self-preferencing and censorship are separable, checkable and comparable.

A search engine's job is to take millions of pages that all match your words and put one of them first. Doing that requires a value function — a decision about what makes a page better than another page. Fresher? More linked-to? More authoritative? Faster to load? Written by someone with an audience? Every one of those is a judgement, and there is no neutral place to stand while making it. The best proof of this is not an argument, it is an engine. Marginalia Search ranks the web deliberately backwards from Google: heavy JavaScript, dense advertising,

Unbiased search engines: what is actually possible — SearchEngines.Net

How many search engines are there? Concept

Nobody counts search engines and no register exists. But the number that matters — organisations crawling the open web themselves — is close to a dozen.

There is no register of search engines, no licensing body, no standards organisation and no census. Anyone asserting a precise global figure has either counted something narrow and not said what, or made it up. What can be said honestly is that the answer differs by an order of magnitude depending on which of three questions you are actually asking. How many websites will search something for you? Uncountable, and rising. Every site with a search box over its own content qualifies under a loose definition, as does every specialist database, every

How many search engines are there? — SearchEngines.Net

Meta search engines explained Concept

What a meta search engine is, why MetaCrawler, Dogpile and SavvySearch mattered in the 1990s, who owns them now, and why the idea has faded.

A meta search engine owns no index. It has no crawler of its own, stores no copy of the web, and computes no ranking from scratch. What it owns is a dispatcher: it takes your query, sends it to several other search engines at once, waits for their answers, strips out the duplicates, and shows you one merged list. That is the whole architecture, and it has not changed since 1995. Everything interesting about metasearch happens in three places — which engines get asked, how the answers are merged into a single ranking, and whether you are told where each

Meta search engines explained — SearchEngines.Net

Advanced search operators explained Concept

What search operators actually do, which ones work across engines, which Google has retired, and why an operator is a request rather than a command.

An advanced search operator is a piece of syntax the engine's query parser recognises before ranking begins. Ordinary query words are signals: the engine weighs them, expands them into synonyms, corrects apparent spelling mistakes, and infers what you probably meant. An operator is meant to be read literally — a constraint on which documents are eligible to be ranked at all, rather than a hint about which ones you would prefer. That distinction explains almost everything about how operators behave. Adding site:example.com does not push results from that

Advanced search operators explained — SearchEngines.Net

Kids and safe search engines: what they really are Concept

Almost every kids search engine is a filter over Google or Bing, not a separate index. How the filtering works, what it misses, and the Kiddle record.

The single most useful fact about "kids search engines" is structural: with very few exceptions they do not crawl the web, do not hold an index, and do not rank anything. They are filtered front ends over Google or Microsoft Bing — a search box, a child-friendly skin, and a filtering layer applied to somebody else's results. That is not a scandal in itself. Building and maintaining a web-scale index costs an enormous amount, and a small team that wants to make search safer for children has no realistic route to owning one. But it changes what you are

Kids and safe search engines: what they really are — SearchEngines.Net

People search engines explained Concept

People search sites are data brokers, not search engines. Where their data comes from, why so much of it is wrong, and what US opt-out rights exist.

The name is the first thing to correct. A web search engine crawls pages that publishers chose to put online, keeps a copy so it can answer queries quickly, and sends you back to the source. It answers a question with links to documents . Take the source page down and the entry drops out of the index at the next crawl, because the index is a pointer, not the thing itself. A people search site does something categorically different. It assembles a durable record about a person — names, ages, current and former addresses, phone numbers, email addresses,

People search engines explained — SearchEngines.Net

Search engine market share, measured and dated Concept

Worldwide search engine market share for July 2026, per StatCounter: Google 91.31%, Bing 4.47%, Yahoo! 1.24%. With the methodology caveats.

Search engine market share describes how search activity is distributed between engines. The phrase hides a question that decides the answer: share of what ? Share of queries, share of users, share of search advertising revenue and share of outbound referral traffic are four different quantities, and they do not agree with one another. The figure almost everyone quotes — including this page — comes from StatCounter Global Stats , and it measures referral traffic . StatCounter counts page views on the websites that carry its tracking code and attributes

Search engine market share, measured and dated — SearchEngines.Net

Search engine market share by country Concept

Search engine market share for 14 countries, July 2026, per StatCounter — including the four markets where Google is not the leader.

Worldwide search share is a nearly useless number for understanding any particular country. Google took 91.31% of worldwide search referrals in July 2026 per StatCounter Global Stats, but that average is assembled from markets running from 97.85% (India) to 1.86% (China, on a panel discussed below). The national picture is where search actually differs. There are, on StatCounter's July 2026 reading, only two countries of any size where Google is not first: China , where Baidu leads, and Russia , where Yandex leads. South Korea is the contested case —

Search engine market share by country — SearchEngines.Net

Search engine comparison: index, ranking, privacy and money Concept

Twelve search engines compared on the four things that matter: who owns the index, how it ranks, what it collects, and who pays for it.

Most search engine comparisons rank engines by result quality, which is subjective and changes weekly. This one compares four structural facts instead — stable, checkable, and between them the explanation for almost every difference a user notices. Index source — does the engine crawl and rank its own copy of the web, blend its own index with a partner's feed, or have no index at all? This is the least-known and most useful fact about any engine, because it decides whether an "alternative" is genuinely an alternative. Ranking philosophy — what the

Search engine comparison: index, ranking, privacy and money — SearchEngines.Net

Search engine APIs and developer tools Concept

Which search engines still sell API access to their index after Bing's retirement, what each one returns, and how the metering is structured.

For years the default way to get web search results into your own software was the Bing Search APIs . They were cheap, documented, and the substrate under an enormous number of products — alternative search engines, browser extensions, research tools, and later the first wave of AI answer products. Microsoft retired them on 11 August 2025. Not deprecated, not price-adjusted: retired. Microsoft's lifecycle announcement is unambiguous — the APIs "will be retired on August 11, 2025", "any existing instances of Bing Search APIs will be decommissioned

Search engine APIs and developer tools — SearchEngines.Net

What is an answer engine? Concept

An answer engine returns a written answer with citations instead of a list of links. What that changes, whose index it runs on, and where it fails.

An answer engine is a product that responds to a question with a written answer rather than with a list of pages that might contain one. Links are still present, usually as numbered markers attached to individual sentences, but they function as supporting evidence for prose rather than as the product itself. The clearest example is Perplexity, which launched its search product on 7 December 2022 and has described itself as an answer engine from the start. Ask it when a company was founded and it returns a paragraph with small numbered citations, each

What is an answer engine? — SearchEngines.Net

AI Overviews explained Concept

What Google's AI Overviews are, how they are generated from Google's own index, when they arrived, and whether they can be switched off.

An AI Overview is a summary written by a Gemini model that Google places above the ranked results on a Google search results page. It is a few paragraphs or a short list, with links to some of the pages it drew on, and it appears on some queries and not others without the reader choosing it. Two things about that description do most of the work. First, an AI Overview is generated , not retrieved: no page on the web contains that text, and refreshing the same query can produce different wording. Second, it is grounded on Google's existing index — the

AI Overviews explained — SearchEngines.Net

Conversational search engines Concept

What a conversational search engine is, how multi-turn search actually works, which products run one, and whose web index each of them is grounded on.

A conversational search engine is a search product where the interaction is a dialogue rather than a series of independent queries. You ask a question in ordinary language, you get a written answer, and your next message is understood in the context of the previous one. "And what about the older model?" is a valid follow-up, even though it contains no searchable terms at all. That single property — carried context across turns — is what separates a conversational search engine from a search engine that happens to accept a long query. A conventional

Conversational search engines — SearchEngines.Net

AEO and GEO explained Concept

Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization: what the terms claim to mean, where they came from, and what Google's own documentation says.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) are names for the same proposition: that appearing as a cited source inside an AI-generated answer is an outcome distinct from ranking in a list of search results, and that it can be pursued as its own discipline. The same proposition also circulates as LLMO, AI SEO, LLM SEO, GAIO and "AI visibility". A field with a settled body of knowledge usually settles on a word for itself; five competing names in three years is a reasonable indicator of how young and how unsettled this one

AEO and GEO explained — SearchEngines.Net

How AI search engines cite sources Concept

Where the citations in an AI answer come from, what they prove and what they do not, and why the citable set is fixed by whose index the engine uses.

A citation in a generated answer is a record that a document was retrieved and was available to the model while it wrote. It is a claim about provenance . It is not a quotation, not a page reference in the academic sense, and not a guarantee that the sentence it is attached to reflects what that document says. This distinction is the single most important thing to understand about the format, because the visual grammar of a small numbered marker after a sentence is borrowed directly from academic writing, where it means something much stronger. In a

How AI search engines cite sources — SearchEngines.Net

How to change your default search engine Concept

Where the default search engine setting lives in Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox in August 2026, why it reverts, and what changes after you switch.

In every major browser the default search engine is a dropdown inside Settings , not in any right-click or toolbar menu: Chrome and Edge put it under a Search engine heading, Safari puts it in a Search tab, and Firefox puts it in a Search panel. Change the dropdown and every query you type into the address bar from that moment on goes to the engine you picked. As of August 2026, on current desktop versions, the four fastest routes are: Chrome — paste chrome://settings/search into the address bar, then set Search engine used in the address bar . Edge —

How to change your default search engine — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine in Chrome Concept

Set Chrome's address-bar search engine on desktop, Android and iOS, checked August 2026 — plus why it reverts and what happens to the new tab page.

Type or paste chrome://settings/search into Chrome's address bar, press Enter, and set the dropdown labelled Search engine used in the address bar . That single control governs every query you type into the address bar, the search box on the new-tab page, and the right-click Search … for item. These paths describe Chrome on desktop and mobile as of August 2026 — Chrome's settings layout for search has been stable across recent releases, and the chrome://settings/search address works even when the menu labels around it

How to change the default search engine in Chrome — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine in Safari Concept

Set Safari's search engine on Mac, iPhone and iPad as of August 2026, including the separate Private Browsing engine and why the list is short.

On a Mac, open the Safari menu, choose Settings… , click the Search tab, and pick from the Search engine pop-up menu. On an iPhone or iPad, open the Settings app, tap Apps , tap Safari , and tap Search Engine . These paths describe Safari on macOS 26 and on iOS and iPadOS 26 as of August 2026 . Two older-version notes matter: on macOS Monterey and earlier the menu item is Preferences… rather than Settings, and on iOS 17 and earlier Safari sits in the main Settings list instead of inside the Apps section. The Search tab and the Search Engine

How to change the default search engine in Safari — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine in Microsoft Edge Concept

Set Edge's address-bar engine at edge://settings/search, checked August 2026 — plus the separate new tab setting and why Windows search stays on Bing.

Paste edge://settings/search into Edge's address bar, press Enter, and set Search engine used in the address bar . Then, on the same screen, change the setting for what search on new tabs uses from the search box to the Address bar — without that second change, the box on Edge's new-tab page keeps sending queries to Bing. These paths describe Microsoft Edge on desktop as of August 2026 . Edge is built on Chromium, so the settings resemble Chrome's, but Microsoft files them in a different place and adds the new-tab distinction that catches people

How to change the default search engine in Microsoft Edge — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine in Firefox Concept

Set Firefox's default engine in the Search panel, checked August 2026 — separate private-window engine, search shortcuts, and why an add-on can lock it.

Open the ☰ menu at the top right, choose Settings , click Search in the left sidebar, and pick from the Default Search Engine dropdown. Typing about:preferences#search into the address bar goes to the same screen in one step. These paths describe Firefox on desktop as of August 2026 . Firefox has kept this panel in the same place across many releases, and unlike Chrome and Edge it puts the default engine, the private-window engine, the suggestion toggles and the per-engine shortcuts on a single

How to change the default search engine in Firefox — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine on iPhone Concept

Safari's search engine on iPhone lives in Settings, not in Safari. The exact iOS 26 path, plus the separate settings Chrome, Firefox and Brave keep.

On an iPhone, Safari's search engine is changed in the Settings app rather than anywhere inside Safari itself: open Settings → Apps → Safari → Search Engine and tap the one you want. That setting governs Safari only — Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge and DuckDuckGo's own browser each carry a separate default that lives inside their own app and is untouched by it. The steps below describe iOS 26 , the version shipping on iPhones as of August 2026, and they hold unchanged on iOS 18. On iOS 17 and earlier there is no Apps screen: Safari sits directly in the

How to change the default search engine on iPhone — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine on iPad Concept

On iPad the Safari search engine is an iPadOS setting: Settings, Apps, Safari, Search Engine. Plus profiles, managed school iPads and other browsers.

Safari's search engine on iPad is an iPadOS setting: open Settings , choose Apps in the left-hand sidebar, tap Safari , then Search Engine , and pick from the list. Nothing inside Safari itself changes it, and no other browser on the iPad obeys it. What follows was written against iPadOS 26 as it stands in August 2026; the same path applies on iPadOS 18. If your iPad runs iPadOS 17 or older there is no Apps entry — Safari appears in the sidebar directly, roughly two thirds of the way down, and everything after that step is unchanged. Open Settings . On

How to change the default search engine on iPad — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine on Android Concept

Android has three separate search defaults: Chrome, the Google app and widget, and the digital assistant. Which one to change, and what cannot be changed.

If you mean the browser, open Chrome, tap the ⋮ menu, tap Settings , tap Search engine , and select one. If you mean the Google search bar sitting on your home screen, there is no equivalent setting — that bar belongs to the Google app, it only searches with Google, and the fix is to replace the widget rather than to configure it. Written in August 2026, against current Chrome for Android on Android 15 and Android 16. Manufacturer software changes the wording of the system screens more than the version number does: Samsung's One UI, Xiaomi's HyperOS and

How to change the default search engine on Android — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine on Windows Concept

Edge's address bar and the Windows taskbar search are separate systems. How to change the first, what you can and cannot do about the second.

For Microsoft Edge: paste edge://settings/search into the address bar, press Enter, and change Search engine used in the address bar . For the search box on the taskbar and in the Start menu, there is no equivalent — Windows Search sends its web results to Bing, and Windows offers no supported setting that points it at another engine. Written in August 2026 against Windows 11 and the current release channel of Edge. The Edge path has been stable across recent versions, but the settings page is long enough that the menu route is worth having: Open Edge

How to change the default search engine on Windows — SearchEngines.Net

How to change the default search engine on a Mac Concept

Safari, Chrome and Firefox each hold their own search engine on macOS, and Spotlight holds none of them. Where every setting lives, checked August 2026.

In Safari, open the Safari menu in the menu bar, choose Settings… (or press Command–Comma ), click the Search tab, and pick from the Search engine pop-up menu. That covers Safari alone: Chrome and Firefox each store a default of their own, and Spotlight has no engine setting at all. Written against macOS 26 and Safari 26 in August 2026. On macOS 12 Monterey and earlier the menu item reads Preferences… rather than Settings… ; everything after that has been consistent for years. Bring Safari to the front so that Safari appears at the left of the menu bar,

How to change the default search engine on a Mac — SearchEngines.Net

How to remove a search engine hijacker Concept

How browser hijackers change your default search engine, why resetting it does not stick, and how to find and undo the mechanism doing it.

If your search engine changes back every time you fix it, the setting is not broken — something installed on the machine is reapplying it, and that something has to go first. Find and remove the mechanism — almost always a browser extension, an administrative policy or a modified program shortcut — then reset the browser, then set the engine you want. Doing it in that order matters. Resetting the dropdown while the cause is still installed produces the loop that brings most people to a page like this

How to remove a search engine hijacker — SearchEngines.Net
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