Google alternatives

[Dani]

I know that Google has a few alternatives such as Bing and DuckDuckGo, among others.

However, back when I first got into SEO, there were a dozen search engines: GoTo.com, Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, etc. They each brought a decent amount of traffic.

Why is it that Google has become such a monopoly that not a single other search engine can gain any reasonable share of the market in all these years?

[rproffitt]

Just for fun I put "Why is it that Google has become such a monopoly" at Grok. com and it was pretty clear that, well, Gork is good at such things.

[trcooke]

For the times when I really want to search for something that isn't just "what was the link to that site I already know about" I would use Kagi. There are no ads, no sponsored results, just stuff that's relevant to your search criteria. It's free for low usage but if required I would pay for it too since I would deem it worth it.

[Dani]

I get that there are all these alternatives. Most of them revolve around privacy-first, or that sorta thing. My question is more of why do you think not a single one of them has gained any meaningful market share over the past decades? Meanwhile, when Google came to the forefront, we were living in a world of quite a handful of search engines that each had relatively similar slices of the market.

[SCBWV]

I asked Copilot. Good reasoning. I believe it. Matches my inferior intellect. 🤣

[lakshya_pareek]

Here are some popular Google alternatives you can use:

DuckDuckGo – Privacy-focused, no tracking
Bing – Strong visuals and AI features
Brave Search – Independent and privacy-first
Startpage – Google results without tracking
Ecosia – Plants trees with searches
Yahoo – Classic alternative

These offer different benefits like privacy, eco-friendliness, or unique search results.

[Bart_6]

There are a few reasons:

• Creating a full index of the web is hard and expensive. The main ones are Google and Bing and most other search engines simply pay one of those for their results. Those results are priced high enough that you can't really compete in a meaningful way.
• Many other features have a big moat, for example: flight search, movie showtimes, sport results, etc. Those extra features that adds value to Google are locking behind data brokers and might require enterprise contracts, etc.
• It's incredibly hard for users to mentally switch. It took my over a month to "trust" my own search engine, even though I wrote the code and I know how it works. I still ended up checking on Google (to no avail) if the results weren't good. Now, after over a year of only using NeoSearch I cannot go back to Google.
• It has been super hard to even convince close friends to switch to NeoSearch, even though the results are better than Google for 90%+ of searches (it starts with the top 20 Google results and enhanced the results from there). There is some psychology at work that makes it nearly impossible for a much better search engine to get users.

So yeah, those are some of the reasons we can't have nice things :P

[Yrth]

I think the only reason Google became the 'gold standard', as it were, is simply because at the start, it had a superior searh algorythm. It was better than the competition. These days, that is likely far less true, if it's true at all, but we have a whole generation that was born to it. That's hard to undo. Even the name 'Google', has become synonymous with 'look it up online'. "Google it!". That's a pretty hefty cultural anchor, too.