Search engine throughout the Internet. Russian search engines

Just recently, erudition was at a high price. But today, knowledge of all the world's capitals and the smallest historical details is absolutely useless. Instead of stuffing your brain with unnecessary facts, you just need to know what search engines there are on the Internet. Everything else will be decided by the smartest software algorithm.

Brief description of search engines

A search engine is a software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Query results are usually presented in the form of a search results page consisting of a dozen short text blocks (snippets) combined with multimedia content.

Today there are about a dozen international data search tools. They all operate on the same principles:

1. Responsible for collecting information crawler- a robot (more simply, a special program) that “crawls” from site to site and enters various types of data into the index (page content, program scripts, meta tags, etc.);
2. Once added to the index, the information becomes available to the average user through the search bar interface;
3. The results on the results page are ranked in a special way. The key indicator is relevance- compliance with the initial request.

How to use the search engine?

The developers of these systems did everything possible to ensure that everyone, even children, could work with them. And, I must say, they succeeded:

1. In order to appeal to the mind of a search engine, just go to its official website. The design of the start pages may differ, but the text input line will definitely be in the most visible place;
2. An even simpler way is to set a request through the address bar of the browser. Most modern browsers support this feature;
3. If typing text in a particular situation is difficult or impossible, you can use the voice input function (launched by pressing the microphone icon);
4. A split second after the call, the system will display the results;
5. To speed up the search, you can use logical operators. Thus, adding a minus sign in front of a word will exclude it from the search results, a plus sign will inform the search engine that this word must be in the searched text, and a phrase in quotation marks will launch a search for the exact phrase;
6. If you couldn’t find the information you needed, it doesn’t matter. No one is stopping you from using another service. Here is an overview of the main players in this market.

Overview of key services

At the turn of the century, almost every state had its own national search engine. However, after several years, competition has left only a few global players:

• Google- the undisputed market leader. It accounts for the lion's share of global search traffic. In developed countries, its share ranges from 80 to 90%. In Russia, the car’s success is not so impressive: only 40% share;
• Yandex- the main competitor for Google in Russia, currently occupies a leading position, but due to a change in the search algorithm in 2017, it gradually began to lose its position;
• ‒ ranks third in RuNet (about 5%), search from a well-known Russian company, part of the Mail.Ru Group, which owns the social networks Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, the Nigma search engine (we will describe it below), the Qiwi payment system and much more.
• Bing- a service from Microsoft. It produces the best results primarily in English. The Russian-speaking segment is practically undeveloped. This, however, does not prevent Bing from being the No. 2 search engine in the world (7%);
• The Chinese company follows closely behind "Baidu", which primarily serves the East Asian markets (China and Japan). It is little known in the West and in Russia;
• Yahoo!- stood at the origins of the modern high-tech sphere, but lost in the competition. Today he uses a solution from Microsoft;
• Nigma- a once popular search engine founded by Russian programmers in 2005, which has now almost lost its share of traffic;
• Duckduckgogo- positions itself as a service that takes care of users’ personal data (there is no cache collection or personalization).

Yandex: “our everything” in RuNet

A conversation about searching for information on the Internet would be incomplete without mentioning the key player in the Russian market - Yandex. Its founders, Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, launched a joint venture long before the Google brand was born. Over many decades, the search engine has become one of the largest search engines in the world (No. 4 since 2014).

The main reason for this phenomenon is the highest quality of service:

• Yandex was the first to launch a search taking into account Russian morphology. This innovation allowed him to overtake the then IT industry giant Rambler in 2001;
• Since 2009, the service began to take into account the user’s region of residence. Thanks to this, regional sites received an impetus for development;
• In the same year, the Matrixnet machine learning algorithm was launched, which significantly increased the speed and quality of the service;
• At the same time, an English-language website was developing, for which Yandex rented an office in California;
• In 2012, query results began to take into account the personal preferences of a particular user.

The popularity of the system is constantly growing: from 2001 to 2017, the volume of traffic increased 280 times. But, as we wrote earlier, after a radical change in the algorithm in 2017, Yandex began to lose the share of its visitors to Google; you can see the full statistics of RuNet traffic at the moment by following the link.

How to remove information about yourself from a search engine?

The Internet is not only a benefit for all humanity, but also a potential source of threats. Some of them pose a significant threat to the personal data of ordinary users. Once online, even the most offensive information cannot be deleted.

That's how it was, at least until recently. Since January 2016, the law “On the right to be forgotten” has been in force in Russia. Now every person who is not satisfied with his reputation in the virtual world can clear it in a completely legal way. To do this you need:

1. Submit an appropriate application to the organization providing search services;
2. Attach all possible evidence of the falsity and irrelevance of the data that is proposed to be removed from the search results;
3. Most search engines make it easier for users. You can send a corresponding request through a special online form (for Yandex);
4. Within ten days, the company will check the application for legal grounds;
5. If the outcome is positive, the information is subject to removal from the index;
6. If no grounds for removal are established, the organization notifies the applicant.

The permanent host of the program “Clever Men and Clever People,” Yuri Vyazemsky, mentioned in one of his interviews how he discovered an unusual word from Bulgakov and tried to find its meaning. Working in the library took a whole year (!). Today it is impossible to imagine such a situation: there are many search engines on the Internet. One click - and everyone can connect to the world's mind.

Video review of anonymous search engines

In this video, Anton Morozov will tell you what search engines exist that maintain complete user confidentiality:

At first glance, it may seem that only Yandex can be better than Google, and even that is not a fact. These companies invest huge amounts of money in innovation and development. Does anyone really have a chance not only to compete with the leaders, but also to win? Lifehacker's answer: “Yes!” There are several search engines that have succeeded. Let's look at our heroes.

What is this

This is a fairly well-known open source search engine. Servers are located in the USA. In addition to its own robot, the search engine uses results from other sources: Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram|Alpha.

The better

DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that provides maximum privacy and confidentiality. The system does not collect any data about the user, does not store logs (no search history), and the use of cookies is as limited as possible.

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information from users. This is our privacy policy.
Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo

Why do you need this

All major search engines are trying to personalize search results based on data about the person in front of the monitor. This phenomenon is called the “filter bubble”: the user sees only those results that are consistent with his preferences or that the system deems as such.

DuckDuckGo creates an objective picture that does not depend on your past behavior on the Internet, and eliminates thematic advertising from Google and Yandex based on your queries. With DuckDuckGo, it’s easy to search for information in foreign languages: Google and Yandex by default give preference to Russian-language sites, even if the query is entered in another language.

What is this

"" is a Russian metasearch system developed by Moscow State University graduates Viktor Lavrenko and Vladimir Chernyshov. It searches through the indexes of Google, Bing, Yandex and others, and also has its own search algorithm.

The better

Searching through the indexes of all major search engines allows you to generate relevant results. In addition, Nigma divides the results into several thematic groups (clusters) and invites the user to narrow the search field, discarding unnecessary ones or highlighting priority ones. Thanks to the Mathematics and Chemistry modules, you can solve mathematical problems and request the results of chemical reactions directly in the search bar.

Why do you need this

Eliminates the need to search for the same query in different search engines. The cluster system makes it easy to manipulate search results. For example, Nigma collects results from online stores into a separate cluster. If you do not intend to buy anything, then simply exclude this group. By selecting the “English-language sites” cluster, you will receive results only in English. The Mathematics and Chemistry modules will help schoolchildren.

Unfortunately, the project is not currently being developed, as the developers have transferred their activity to the Vietnamese market. Nevertheless, “Nigma” is not only not outdated yet, but in some things it still gives Google a head start. Let's hope development resumes.

What is this

not Evil is a system that searches the anonymous Tor network. To use it, you need to go to this network, for example, by launching a specialized browser of the same name. not Evil is not the only search engine of its kind. There is LOOK (the default search in the Tor browser, accessible from the regular Internet) or TORCH (one of the oldest search engines on the Tor network) and others. We settled on not Evil because of the clear allusion to Google itself (just look at the start page).

The better

It searches where Google, Yandex and other search engines are generally closed.

Why do you need this

The Tor network contains many resources that cannot be found on the law-abiding Internet. And as government control over the content of the Internet tightens, their number will grow. Tor is a kind of Network within the Network: with its own social networks, torrent trackers, media, trading platforms, blogs, libraries, and so on.

YaCy

What is this

YaCy is a decentralized search engine that works on the principle of P2P networks. Each computer on which the main software module is installed scans the Internet independently, that is, it is analogous to a search robot. The results obtained are collected into a common database that is used by all YaCy participants.

The better

It’s difficult to say whether this is better or worse, since YaCy is a completely different approach to organizing search. The absence of a single server and owner company makes the results completely independent of anyone's preferences. The autonomy of each node eliminates censorship. YaCy is capable of searching the deep web and non-indexed public networks.

Why do you need this

If you are a supporter of open source software and a free Internet, not influenced by government agencies and large corporations, then YaCy is your choice. It can also be used to organize a search within a corporate or other autonomous network. And even though YaCy is not very useful in everyday life, it is a worthy alternative to Google in terms of the search process.

Pipl

What is this

Pipl is a system designed to search for information about a specific person.

The better

The authors of Pipl claim that their specialized algorithms search more efficiently than “regular” search engines. In particular, priority sources of information include social network profiles, comments, member lists, and various databases that publish information about people, such as court decisions. Pipl's leadership in this area is confirmed by assessments from Lifehacker.com, TechCrunch and other publications.

Why do you need this

If you need to find information about a person living in the US, then Pipl will be much more effective than Google. The databases of Russian courts are apparently inaccessible to the search engine. Therefore, he does not cope so well with Russian citizens.

What is this

Another specialized search engine. Searches for various sounds (house, nature, cars, people, etc.) in open sources. The service does not support queries in Russian, but there is an impressive list of Russian-language tags that you can search for.

The better

The output contains only sounds and nothing extra. In the search settings you can set the desired format and sound quality. All sounds found are available for download. There is a search for sounds by pattern.

Why do you need this

If you need to quickly find the sound of a musket shot, the blows of a suckling woodpecker, or the cry of Homer Simpson, then this service is for you. And I chose this only from the available Russian-language queries. In English the spectrum is even wider. But seriously, a specialized service requires a specialized audience. But what if it comes in handy for you too?

The life of alternative search engines is often fleeting. Lifehacker asked the former general director of the Ukrainian branch of Yandex, Sergei Petrenko, about the long-term prospects of such projects.

As for the fate of alternative search engines, it is simple: to be very niche projects with a small audience, therefore without clear commercial prospects or, conversely, with complete clarity of their absence.

If you look at the examples in the article, you can see that such search engines either specialize in a narrow but popular niche, which, perhaps, has not yet grown enough to be noticeable on the radars of Google or Yandex, or they are testing an original hypothesis in ranking, which is not yet applicable in regular search.

For example, if a search on Tor suddenly turns out to be in demand, that is, results from there are needed by at least a percentage of Google’s audience, then, of course, ordinary search engines will begin to solve the problem of how to find them and show them to the user. If the behavior of the audience shows that for a significant proportion of users in a significant number of queries, results given without taking into account factors depending on the user seem more relevant, then Yandex or Google will begin to produce such results.

“Be better” in the context of this article does not mean “be better at everything.” Yes, in many aspects our heroes are far from Google and Yandex (even far from Bing). But each of these services gives the user something that the search industry giants cannot offer.

Search engines (SEs) have been an essential part of the Internet for quite some time. Today they are huge and complex mechanisms that are not only a tool for finding any necessary information, but also quite exciting areas for business.

Many search users have never thought about the principles of their operation, how to process user requests, or how these systems are built and function. This material will help people who are involved in optimization and understanding the structure and main functions of search engines.

Functions and concept of PS

Search system is a hardware and software complex that is designed to carry out the search function on the Internet, and responds to a user request, which is usually specified in the form of a text phrase (or more precisely a search query), by issuing a reference list to information sources, based on relevance. The most common and largest search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu. In RuNet - Yandex, Mail.Ru, Rambler.

Let's take a closer look at the meaning of the search query, taking the Yandex system as an example.

The request must be formulated by the user in full accordance with the subject of his search, as simply and briefly as possible. For example, we want to find information in this search engine: “how to choose a car for yourself.” To do this, open the main page and enter the search query “how to choose a car.” Then our functions are reduced to following the provided links to information sources on the network.

But even acting in this way, we may not get the information we need. If we received such a negative result, we just need to reformat our request, or the search database really does not have any useful information on this type of request (this is quite possible given the “narrow” parameters of the request, such as, for example, “how to choose a car in Anadyr ").

The most basic task of every search engine is to deliver to people exactly the type of information that they need. And it is practically impossible to teach users to create the “correct” type of queries to search engines, that is, phrases that will correspond to their operating principles.

That is why specialist search engine developers create principles and algorithms for their work that would allow users to find the information they are interested in. This means that the system must “think” in the same way as a person thinks when searching for the necessary information on the Internet.

When he enters his query into a search engine, he wants to find what he needs as easily and quickly as possible. Having received the result, the user makes his assessment of the system’s performance, guided by several criteria. Was he able to find the information he needed? If not, how many times did he have to reformat the query text to find it? How up-to-date was the information they received? How quickly did the search engine process his request? How user friendly were the search results provided? Was the desired result first, or was it in 30th place? How much “junk” (unnecessary information) was found along with useful information? Will relevant information be found for him, when using the PS, in a week or in a month?

In order to get the right answers to such questions, search developers are constantly improving the principles of ranking and its algorithms, adding new features and functions to them, and by any means trying to make the system work faster.

Main characteristics of search engines

Let us indicate the main characteristics of the search:

Completeness.

Completeness is one of the most important characteristics of a search; it represents the ratio of the number of information documents found upon request to their total number on the Internet related to a given request. For example, there are 100 pages on the Internet with the phrase “how to choose a car”, and for the same query only 60 of the total were selected, then in this case the completeness of the search will be 0.6. It is clear that the more complete the search itself, the greater the likelihood that the user will find exactly the document he needs, of course, if it exists at all.

Accuracy.

Another main function of a search engine is accuracy. It determines the degree to which the pages found on the Internet match the user’s request. For example, if for the key phrase “how to choose a car” there are a hundred documents, half of them contain this phrase, and the rest simply have the following words (how to choose a car radio correctly and install it in a car), then the search accuracy equals 50/100 = 0.5.

The more accurate the search, the sooner the user will find the information he needs, the less various “garbage” will be found among the results, the fewer documents found will not correspond to the meaning of the request.

Relevance.

This is a significant component of search, which is characterized by the time that passes from the moment information is published on the Internet until it is entered into the search engine’s index database.

For example, the day after information about the release of a new iPad appeared, many users turned to search with relevant types of queries. In most cases, information about this news is already available in the search, although very little time has passed since its appearance. This is due to the large search engines having a “fast database” that is updated several times a day.

Search speed.

Such a function as search speed is closely related to the so-called “load resistance”. A huge number of people access search every second; such workload requires a significant reduction in the time to process one request. Here the interests of both the search engine and the user completely coincide: the visitor wants to get results as quickly as possible, and the search engine must process his request as quickly as possible, so as not to slow down the processing of subsequent requests.

Visibility.

Visual presentation of results is the most important element of search convenience. Based on many queries, the search engine finds thousands, and in some cases millions, of different documents. Due to the vagueness of the compilation of key phrases for the search or its inaccuracy, even the very first query results do not always contain only the necessary information.

This means that a person often has to conduct their own search among the results provided. Various components of search results pages help you navigate search results.

History of the development of search engines

When the Internet first began to develop, the number of its regular users was small, and the amount of information to access was relatively small. Basically, only specialists in research fields had access to this network. At that time, the task of finding information was not as urgent as it is now.

One of the very first methods of organizing wide access to information resources was the creation of site directories, and links to them began to be grouped by topic. The first project was the Yahoo.com resource, which opened in the spring of 1994. Subsequently, when the number of sites in the Yahoo directory increased significantly, the option to search for the necessary information in the directory was added. It was not yet a full search system, since the scope of such a search was limited only to sites included in this directory, and not absolutely all resources on the Internet. Link directories were widely used in the past, but nowadays they have almost completely lost their popularity.

After all, even today’s catalogs, which are enormous in volume, contain information about only a small portion of sites on the Internet. The most famous and largest directory in the world has information on five million sites, while Google's database contains information on more than 25 billion pages.

The very first real search engine was WebCrawler, which appeared back in 1994.

The following year AltaVista and Lycos appeared. Moreover, the first was the leader in information search for a very long time.

In 1997, Sergey Brin, together with Larry Page, created the Google search engine as a research project at Stanford University. Today it is Google, the most popular and popular search engine in the world.

In September 1997, the Yandex PS was announced (officially), which is currently the most popular search system on the RuNet.

According to September 2015, the shares of search engines in the world are distributed as follows:

• Google - 69.24%;
• Bing - 12.26%;
• Yahoo! - 9.19%;
• Baidu - 6.48%;
• AOL - 1.11%;
• Ask - 0.23%;
• Excite - 0.00%

According to December 2016, shares of search engines in Runet:

• Yandex - 48.40%
• Google - 45.10%
• Search.Mail.ru - 5.70%
• Rambler - 0.40%
• Bing - 0.30%
• Yahoo - 0.10%

How a search engine works

In Russia, the main search engine is Yandex, then Google, and then [email protected]. All large search engines have their own structure, which is quite different from others. But it is still possible to identify the basic elements common to all search engines.

Indexing module.

This component consists of three robot programs:

Spider(in English spider) is a program that is designed to download web pages. The spider downloads a specific page, simultaneously extracting all links from it. HTML code is downloaded from almost every page. For this, robots use HTTP protocols.

"Spider" functions as follows. The robot sends a request to the server “get/path/document” and other HTTP request commands. In response, the robot program receives a text stream that contains service-type information and, of course, the document itself.

• URL of the downloaded page;
• date when the page was downloaded;
• server http response header;
• html code, “body” of the page.

Crawler(“traveling” spider). This program automatically goes to all links that are found on the page and also highlights them. Its task is to decide where the spider should go next, based on these links or based on a given list of addresses.

Indexer(robot indexer) is a program that analyzes pages that spiders have downloaded.

The indexer completely parses the page into its component elements and analyzes them using its own morphological and lexical types of algorithms.

The analysis is carried out on various parts of the page, such as headings, text, links, style and structural features, html tags, etc.

Thus, the indexing module makes it possible to follow links of a given number of resources, download pages, extract links to new pages from received documents and perform a detailed analysis of them.

Database

Database(or search engine index) is a data storage complex, an array of information in which the modified parameters of each document processed by the indexing module and downloaded are stored in a certain way.

Search server

This is the most important element of the entire system, because the speed and, of course, the quality of the search directly depend on the algorithms underlying its functionality.

The search server works as follows:

• The request that comes from the user is subject to morphological analysis. The information environment of any document available in the database is generated (it will subsequently be displayed as a snippet, i.e. an information field of text corresponding to a given request).
• The received data is passed as input parameters to a specialized ranking module. They are processed for all documents, and as a result, for each such document its own rating is calculated, which characterizes the relevance of such a document to the user’s request, and other components.
• Depending on the conditions specified by the user, this rating may well be adjusted by additional ones.
• Then the snippet itself is generated, i.e. For any document found, the title, abstract that best matches the query, and a link to this document are extracted from the corresponding table, and the found word forms and words are highlighted.
• The results of the resulting search are transmitted to the person who performed it in the form of a page on which search results (SERP) are displayed.

All these elements are closely related to each other and function, interacting, forming a distinct, but rather complex mechanism for the functioning of the PS, requiring enormous expenditure of resources.

The undisputed leader in terms of queries in the world is the Google search engine. The search engine processes more than a billion user requests every day. The company has the largest share (about 62%) of the entire search engine market and offers users a variety of online services and tools that allow them to provide the most relevant results. Googlebot crawls about 25 billion web pages per month, which is also the largest number for web search. According to some data, the search engine is able to work with information posted on the Internet in 195 languages ​​and search for it equally effectively.

"Yandex"

Yandex ranks 4th in the world in terms of the number of requests processed per day.

The first most popular search engine in Russia. Initially built on the Google engine, today Yandex offers its own search algorithm, aimed at Russian-speaking users in Russia and the CIS countries. The search engine successfully copes with its task and offers both visitors and webmasters a variety of services that can not only improve the quality of the results provided, but also make surfing the Internet more convenient.

Other search engines

There are a great many popular search engines: Yahoo, AOL, Ask, Mail.ru, Rambler. Some search engines use mechanisms borrowed from other systems (for example, QIP.ru uses the Yandex engine).

Among other search engines, we can note the no less popular Baidu, whose main audience is located in China. The search engine ranks 3rd in the world in terms of the number of queries processed. The site has its own services, for example, an encyclopedia, an anti-virus program, a translator, etc. The Bing project from Microsoft is also gaining increasing popularity, which also has its share in the market and ranks 2nd in the world after Google in terms of traffic. The search engine has not yet been officially launched in Russia, but is capable of processing Russian-language results. Bing search is the default search in Internet Explorer and on phones and tablets running Windows Phone and Windows 8.

There are also highly specialized search engines. For example, we can highlight image search engines (for example, TinEye), grabbers (for example, Guenon, which shows the contents of other sites on its pages). There are also search resources with a registration system (DuckDuckGo).

The search engine is one of the key layers of the Internet, along with content and the browser. Yandex search engine or similar systems (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and others) allow the user to search for information on the World Wide Web by formulating a query.

The job of a search engine is to find all documents, pages, videos, that is, all content, for this query (keyword or phrase).

Which search engine is the best? Are there alternative options, something other than Google and Yandex? Which Internet search engine is more suitable for scanning English-language sources or, for example, music? This is exactly what the article will discuss.

Rating: market leaders

If we talk about the world as a whole, then Google search engine is the most popular search engine. The corporation occupies almost 70% of the market. The second position in the ranking is occupied by Bing (share - 12.26%). The Baidu system is fighting for second place (6.48% as of September 2015). From time to time they change places.

So, for example, in 2014, the “forces” were distributed differently: the first place was occupied by Google search engine with 68.69%, the second by Baidu (17.7%), the third by Bing with a market capitalization of 6, 22%.

But global data is very generalized. Which search engine is the best?

In China, for example, a very small percentage of the population scans with Google; the majority uses the domestic Soso system. In South Korea, most residents use their own development - the Internet search engine Naver. However, in the last few months the number of requests in this system has begun to decline rapidly.

In Japan and Taiwan, users are the most likely to use Yahoo!

Rating: Russian-language systems

Which search engine is the best? In Russia, search engine rankings are not at all similar to the global ones. The market leader in the Russian-language segment of the Internet is Yandex, which is used by more than 55% of users.

In second place is Google with a result of 37.6%. According to the LiveInternet service, the coverage of Russian-language search queries on the World Wide Web was distributed as follows:

1. Universal search engines: Google (37.6%), Bing (0.3%), Yahoo! (0.1%).
2. English-speaking and international (AskJeeves, for example).
3. Russian-language search engines: Yandex (56.2%), Mail (5.3%), Rambler (0.5%).

DuckDuckGo

A conversation about alternative search engines should start with the DuckDuckGo search engine. This is a fairly well-known and widespread open source system. DuckDuckGo servers are located in the United States of America. The search results are quite extensive, since the system uses not only its own algorithms, but also the results of some other sources, for example, Wikipedia, the Bing search engine and Yahoo!

The DuckDuckGo search engine ensures maximum security of the user's personal information, privacy and confidentiality. The system does not collect any data about users, does not store history and limits the use of cookies as much as possible.

The difference between DuckDuckGo is that this system does not personalize search results, as other systems do. In Google or Yandex, for example, the user sees only information that is consistent with his preferences. But DuckDuckGo creates a real picture and allows you to get rid of intrusive specific advertising. The search service easily searches for information in foreign languages, while Yandex and Google by default give preference to Russian-language sources, even if the query is entered in English, German or another language.

The system allows you to customize the interface: you can change colors, fonts, links and other parameters in just a few clicks.

This search engine is still far from the giant Google, but the duckling is developing, so it is quite possible that in the future DuckDuckGo will take one of the leading positions. The team has created an excellent product that provides an anonymous, fast and functional search that deserves the user's attention.

NotEvil

This is a system that searches the anonymous Tor network. The search engine is preinstalled in the browser of the same name. Why is notEvil better? It “goes” where Google or Yandex search engines cannot reach. In general, there are a lot of resources on the Tor network that cannot be visited on the “regular” (law-abiding) Internet. This is a kind of platform within the network with its own social platforms, torrent trackers, media, blogs, shopping centers, forums, libraries and so on.

By the way, notEvil is not the only search engine of its kind. There is also Look, which is available by default in the same Tor browser, and TORCH is one of the oldest search engines on the anonymous network.

YaCy

The free search engine YaCy is a completely different approach to organizing searches on the World Wide Web. The system operates on the P2P principle. This means that each computer on which the module is installed independently scans the Internet, and then all the results obtained are collected into a single database that can be used by all YaCy users.

The system is completely independent, autonomous, and ensures the anonymity of each user. YaCy is suitable for supporters of an open Internet that is not influenced by large corporations and government agencies.

The search engine is not very useful in everyday life, but in the future it is a worthy alternative to Google, even from the point of view of organizing the process of searching for information.

Pipl

Pipl is a system designed to search for information about a specific person. The developers claim that the search engine’s algorithms search for people more efficiently than Google or Yandex, which are widespread throughout the world.

Priority sources are profiles on social networks, comments, lists of participants, databases where various data about people are published, for example, databases of court decisions. But there is also a drawback. Pipl does not have access to Russian databases, so it will only be useful for searching information about US citizens.

FindSounds

Which search engine is the best? If you need to find music or sounds, then, of course, FindSounds is the best. This is a specialized search engine with a list of tags. Here you can select the desired audio file format or quality. All search results are available for download.

Wolfram|Alpha

This system does not produce pages that contain the information the user needs, but a finished result. For example, maps, graphs, tables, short answers. The service is ideal for calculating data and searching for specific facts. The search engine does not understand all queries yet, but is constantly evolving.

With Wolfram|Alpha it is convenient, for example, to compare parameters for setting up a camera, smartphone or laptop. Also calculate the level of alcohol in the blood (the system asks the user for weight and height, the amount drunk, time, and then tells how long it will take for the alcohol to be completely eliminated from the body).

The tool can convert shoe and clothing sizes, count calories, view exchange rates, or tune a musical instrument.

Dogpile

Dogpile displays results from all common search engines at once. The service uses an improved algorithm and, as the developers assure, generates the best results on the Internet. In addition, there are few advertisements. You can try using Dogpile if the information you need is not found in standard Google or Yandex.

BoardReader

This system searches for information on forums, surveys, question and answer services, and social communities, narrowing the search field to social platforms. You can set filters: language and publication date, site name, etc.

The search engine can be useful to advertising specialists who are interested in the opinion of the audience.

Finally

Often alternative search engines are fleeting. They appear as quickly as they die. Most alternative systems today specialize in a narrow niche or test an original algorithm in generating search results.

In the context of describing alternative search engines, the criterion “better” does not at all mean “better in everything.” Each of the services listed above gives a specific user something that is not available in Google or Yandex. In any case, getting acquainted with alternative options (against the backdrop of the fact that the system seems to be practically monopolized by search giants) is interesting and useful for every user.