On Aug. 5, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in search, violating the antitrust laws. While Google remains the biggest name in search, it’s not the only player in the game.
There are several other search engines to try that have advantages over Google, like more privacy and even a rewards program. You may recognize some of these search engines, like Bing, and you may not have heard of others, like Startpage, but you might not know much about them.
Read more: What Google’s Antitrust Ruling Says About Young People’s Search Habits
The main drawback to these alternate search engines is their lack of comprehensive results. That means you might have to look through more results on these other search engines compared to on Google. Some search engines would show me unhelpful results because of this, but I found it helpful to be more specific with my search queries.
It’s also important to note that even if you use these search engines within Google’s browser Chrome, you may not get the full benefit of some of these search engines. Here are five search engines to try instead of Google.
Bing
Microsoft’s Bing is the closest competitor to Google’s Search despite the market share chasm between the two. According to Statcounter, Google rakes in about 91% of the global search engine market share while Bing — which, again, is Google’s closest challenger — has about 4% of the market share.
Bing has a 2,000 character search field so you can provide as much detail as you want — for reference, this article has about 4,200 characters — and connects to Microsoft’s AI chatbot called Copilot. Bing also has its own rewards program, so the more you use it, the more points you get, which you can exchange for gift cards to places like Amazon, Starbucks, Hulu and more.
You can try Bing for free.
Brave
Brave is a privacy-focused search engine that blocks trackers, and it uses Google as a fallback option. What that means is if your Brave search doesn’t return a lot of results, you can enable the search engine to anonymously check Google for the same query.
Brave also offers other features, like a VPN, a crypto wallet and its own AI assistant named Leo. And Brave said your AI usage is private and secure as well. You don’t even need to create or log into an account to use Leo.
You can try Brave for free.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is another privacy-focused search engine, and it has touted itself as the anti-Google. While Google collects and stores data on you to create personalized search results, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track what you do and actively blocks external trackers.
Over the past few years, DuckDuckGo also expanded the tools it offers to people for free. Now it offers tools like an App Tracking Protection for Android users, its own VPN — that our experts said was great for general privacy and streaming — and an AI tool called DuckAssist.
You can try DuckDuckGo for free.
Startpage
Startpage is a search engine that’s also a search aggregator. That means it partners with other companies like Google and Microsoft Bing to bring you search results.
Despite those partnerships, Startpage said it doesn’t share any of your personal information with its partners and it submits your search requests anonymously to them. Startpage said it also doesn’t use tracking cookies, and it doesn’t review or access cookies you might have from other websites. Think of Startpage as a way to use Google and Bing without either getting ahold of your data.
You can try Startpage for free.
Yahoo
That’s right, Yahoo is still around. And I like that Yahoo shows you top headlines on its homepage before you enter a query, kind of like the front page of a newspaper. The Yahoo homepage also shows you trending topics, your local weather and top stories for you.
Yahoo also offers services like email as well as finance. Yahoo Finance lets you input your portfolio so you can easily track its performance, and it gives you quick access to snapshots of global markets.
You can try Yahoo for free.
Watch this: Judge Says Google Is an Illegal Monopoly: Now What?
For more on other search engines, here’s what to know about DuckDuckGo and Brave Search. You can also check out our review of Microsoft Copilot.
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