Google has become almost synonymous with the notion of search engines with earnings forecast to grow faster (11.29% per year) than the US Internet Content & Information industry (9.68%). Most people who use the internet every day will search its unimaginable vastness with the help of this engine in particular. Also, when someone thinks of SEO, their primary goal is optimization for Google.
Furthermore, dictionaries have included the verb “to google” into their corpus a long time ago. It has since become one of the most commonly used words, almost completely interchangeable with a more general phrase “to search online” or “ to look up”.
We won’t go further into the lexical details of it, we are only painting a picture of the sheer popularity of this search engine.
It may come as a surprise that Google is not the first-ever search engine launched. On the contrary – Yahoo! was the go-to engine in the earlier days of the internet. Google, on the other hand, was released only in 1996 and has been growing its user base and power ever since.
Despite all of its fame, it isn’t the only one currently active either. Far from it – several other engines are great substitutes. And people frequently turn to these for privacy reasons, since, as it’s widely known, Google is a hardened data hoarder, and sometimes will collect user info even in private mode.
Other reasons why internet users to opt for different engines are often geographical, as Google is prohibited in some countries.
With that being said, you should certainly consider submitting your website to other search engines besides Google, as it will give you better reach and a larger audience.
To help you out, here is our pick of top five search engine alternatives to submit your site to.
Bing
Bing comes just after Google according to the number of users. This engine was created by Microsoft in an attempt to create competition for Google. Although these efforts haven’t been extraordinarily successful so far, Bing is definitely more popular than its predecessor MSN.
This engine was built to attract the attention of users and make the general browsing experience visually pleasing. The homepage displays stunning images from around the world which change daily. Also, video search, displays results in an interesting grid of thumbnails that gives a clear overview of the videos.
There is one similarity between Google and Bing though – most of the videos in Bing video search results are actually from YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Bing has its own version of the crawling and indexing algorithm which in some aspects gives completely different results than Google. Firstly, because it is an engine that looks for quality and doesn’t measure it in inbound links. It does, however, give advantage to older and reliable sites.
So, if your website still doesn’t have too many links leading to it, you have nothing to worry about in terms of Bing ranking as long as you provide first-rate content and endure the test of time. Additionally, on Bing, websites are ranked according to their content on landing pages, not the one in blog posts, and all content is crawled no matter if it’s hidden or not.
Yahoo Search
Yahoo Search is a weathered engine that was a pioneer back in the early days of the Internet. In other words, it was the first search engine that had set the ground for those which are nowadays more successful.
Yahoo didn’t have its own index before it acquired Overture Services, Inc., the owner of the AlltheWeb and AltaVista engines. Prior to that, it was powered by other engines such as Inktomi, Bing, and even Google. Today, it uses only Bing’s index, which in practice means that these two engines will come up with pretty much the same search results.
While Yahoo Search might not be the most popular search engine, its mother platform offers a lot of interesting content. On top of this, the level of its organization is astounding. Of course, there is the email service, as well as a news and e-commerce portal, games, horoscopes, etc..
With Yahoo, a search can even be conducted within certain verticals, which sometimes makes the job much easier. Also, image results are perfected with Flickr integration, and Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Finance are there to enrich the platform’s database.
All these features are the reason some people stay faithful to Yahoo. So make sure to submit your website to Bing, in order to reach this group of internet users and potential customers.
Baidu
Baidu is basically Chinese Google. It was built by Robin Li, and since its launch in 2000, it has gained huge popularity among Chinese citizens. The fact that the government has put a ban on Google services must have contributed to the rise in Baidu’s popularity within China.
The first similarity between the two engines is the way their respective developers think. Namely, before launching Baidu, Li had built another search engine named RankDex. This was back in 1996, but the algorithm in this engine and the early version of Google’s PageRank are quite similar.
They are also visually similar, but Baidu was launched with a clearer business plan. This can be seen from the more developed awareness of monetization. In other words, Baidu has been selling its web space since 2004, which wasn’t the case with Google at the time.
Now, there is one important fact to be mentioned here: although available across the world, Baidu only has a version in Chinese. It is also subject to heavy censorship, and certain websites, especially the ones talking about democracy, won’t be available through this engine. The same goes for some types of visual content.
Still, despite the few limitations, this engine is a valuable path leading to a large number of potential Chinese customers…as long as your content is in accordance with the engine’s rules.
Yandex
Yandex is one of the most popular search engines on the Russian territory. The current name is short for “Yet Another Index” – its first name.
Just like we said that Baidu is the Chinese version of Google, we could say that Yandex is the Russian version of the world’s most popular search engine. But like in the case of Baidu, we would be slightly wrong, as Yandex’s founders thought of some things much earlier than Google.
Firstly, this Russian search engine is significantly older than Google and dates back to 1993. Secondly, like Baidu, Yandex has beaten Google to the idea of optimized advertisements placed within the search results. Unlike Google, Yandex has been earning from selling online ads since 1998, which is two years earlier than its American counterpart.
Yandex has also managed to retain its popularity within Russia for quite some time. Up until 2006, it maintained the first position within the country’s borders, and only then did Google take over. However, despite Google’s popularity, Yandex still manages to keep a significant number of its users.
And although the search engine has a .com domain, Yandex’s versatile platform which is similar to Yahoo.com is in the .ru domain and offers different services such as maps, cloud storage, translation, different mobile apps, etc.
This sort of inclusive service is probably why it manages to keep its users. Furthermore, the mere popularity of the engine within a large country such as Russia is why you should submit your website to it.
Duck Duck Go
Duck Duck Go is a great choice if you want to retain your privacy. This search engine launched in 2008, although fairly young, has a loyal user base thanks to its approach to users’ data.
Namely, unlike Google, this engine doesn’t collect any of your data or preferences since it doesn’t earn from trading it. This is why it comes up with the same search results for everyone as long as they look up the same keywords.
However, Duck Duck Go doesn’t have its own index. Instead, it searches around 400 different sources, such as Yahoo, Yandex, Wikipedia, etc.
The results it offers are all conveniently listed on one page, and all you have to do is scroll. But there are certain flaws to its results, though, and among them is the occasional tendency to lead you to outdated results.
Making your website available on this engine will give you a slightly bigger reach on the US market, as it’s most popular there. On top of this, potential customers that are concerned with their privacy are more likely to do their online searches through this engine, so make sure you give them an opportunity to find you.
Final Words
In this article, we listed our suggestions according to their popularity, i.e. the number of users. And since your primary goal will be to reach the largest audience possible, submitting to all these engines is the best choice.
If that is not an option, choose at least some of these, and watch your website traffic grow.