# Are there only two search engines?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 27, 2024, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153 "2024-05-27T19:18:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 9\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jackson99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9de0a6/32.png) [@Jackson99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackson99)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2024, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/1 "2024-05-27T19:18:19Z")

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Are there only two search engines? Some one said there is only two search engines and other search engines pull from them. They said Google and Bing are the main search engines and other search engines pull from them. They go on to say private search engines like Ecosia and DuckDuckGo pull from Bing and start page pulls from Google. I hear Brave search is the only one being built from the ground up but have very little pages index because it is way too early and the index is very little compared to Bing or Google

There also Yandex but that is Russian and have very little US index pages. There also Dogpile search engines that pulls from Google and Bing. And yahoo search that pulls from Bing.

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**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2024, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/2 "2024-05-27T21:01:51Z")

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Does Bing even have a search engine any more? Last I heard, they’d replaced it with a bullshit generator.

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**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2024, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/3 "2024-05-27T21:39:03Z")

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Anyone here have a website? If so they should be able to look at the statistics to see exactly what search robots are scanning it.

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**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2024, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/4 "2024-05-27T22:16:43Z")

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Yes, Microsoft Edge uses Bing as the default search (obviously). It works fine for me, but then I rarely use it for any complicated search.

It does now also give results from AI, i.e. the bullshit generator, but those are easy to ignore, and I do.

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**Author:** ![dasmoocher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dbc845/32.png) [@dasmoocher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dasmoocher)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2024, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/5 "2024-05-27T22:50:55Z")

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By coincidence, I saw this YouTube video right after seeing this thread.

Rant by Adam Conover about why search engines suck and new ones fail:

[How Google RUINED the Internet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7NHABs76mg)

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**Author:** ![jjakucyk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3d9bf3/32.png) [@jjakucyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjakucyk)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2024, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/6 "2024-05-28T13:21:51Z")

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Google is the 800 lb gorilla yes, and Bing also powers DuckDuckGo and Yahoo search. I discovered that when I couldn’t find my site on DuckDuckGo anymore and had to sign up for a Bing Webmaster Tools account to get it sorted (no explanation as to why it was de-listed in the first place). In any case, I do get crawled by other bots like Ahrefs, Semrush, and BLEX, but those are scummy SEO/marketing sites. Yandex crawls occasionally, and there’s a few other bots kicking around from Pinterest, Apple, and Facebook, but their total traffic is very low.

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**Author:** ![Jackson99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9de0a6/32.png) [@Jackson99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackson99)\
**Post date:** [June 2, 2024, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/7 "2024-06-02T23:05:52Z")

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> [@suranyi](#):
>
> Yes, Microsoft Edge uses Bing as the default search (obviously). It works fine for me, but then I rarely use it for any complicated search.
> 
> It does now also give results from AI, i.e. the bullshit generator, but those are easy to ignore, and I do.

I don’t think that changes any thing that there is really only two search engines Google and Bing and three if you count Yandex with Yandex pulling lot of things in Russia and Europe.

Other search engines use Google or Bing.

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**Author:** ![ThisOneGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c0e974/32.png) [@ThisOneGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ThisOneGuy)\
**Post date:** [June 3, 2024, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/8 "2024-06-03T23:19:17Z")

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Just thinking about it Baidu is supposed to be big in China. Have seen it crawling web sites I was working with. Yahoo is much bigger in Japan than in the US, but Google is more highly used still.

Does anyone else know about other languages/areas?

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**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\
**Post date:** [June 4, 2024, 5:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-only-two-search-engines/1002153/9 "2024-06-04T05:22:15Z")

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Perplexity.ai is worth a mention. It’s an AI powered search engine which works with ChatGPT 3.5. The text is every bit as good as you imagine - but it contains cites. I find it helpful, though I’m more likely to use google or duck duck go.

> **[Perplexity.ai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity.ai)**
>
> Perplexity AI is an AI chatbot-powered research and conversational search engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. Launched in 2022, Perplexity generates answers using sources from the web and cites links within the text response. Perplexity works on a freemium model; the free product uses its Perplexity model based on OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model combined with the company's standalone large language model (LLM) that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) cap Perplexi...
