LibGuides: Alternative Search Engines: Home

About This Page

We're all familiar with Google and Bing, but did you know that there are lots of other ways to search the internet? On this page, you'll find links to selected search engines that can give you different kinds of search results, help protect your privacy, and even help protect the environment.

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Credits

This page was created and is maintained by
Jenny Saxton.

Questions and comments are welcome.

Concerned About Your Privacy?

DuckDuckGo
This search engine pledges not to track your searches or save any data about you. You'll see fewer ads, and you can customize the look and feel of the page. Search results come from Bing and a number of other sources.
Qwant
Based in the European Union, this search engine claims to respect user privacy by not using trackers or personalizing search results.
Startpage
This search engine performs your Google search but removes all indentifying information from your query.
Swisscows
Yes, this search engine is based in Switzerland. It doesn't store your data, and it focuses on family-friendly content.

Yippy
This privacy-focused metasearch engine queries other search engines and groups results into subtopics. Searches are powered by IBM Watson.

Concerned About Your Social Conscience?

Ecosia
This search engine donates its profits to tree-planting organizations in countries around the world. Searches are powered by Bing.
Ekoru
Ekoru donates 60% of its revenue to organizations dedicated to cleaning and reforesting our oceans. It doesn't track your searches, and its servers run on eco-friendly hydroelectricity.
giveWater
A Bing-powered search engine that donates advertising revenue to charitable partners that provide clean water and sanitation to people in need.
GoodShop
Help raise funds for nonprofits and schools when you use this site for your online shopping. For each internet search you perform with the site's Yahoo-powered GoodSearch, a penny is donated to the charity of your choice.
Print Friendly
Not a search engine, but if you need to print a web page from your search results, this handy tool conserves paper and ink by removing the ads and other unecessary information.

More To Try

Bing vs. Google
This site allows you to search Bing and Google simultaneously and gives you a side-by-side comparison of results.
Dogpile
A metasearch engine that retrieves results from Google, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Kiddle
A kid-friendly alternative to Google.
Million Short
This experimental search engine lets you skim the top million (or 100k, 10k, 1k, or 100) hits off of your Google search results to reveal the sites that never make it to the top.
Social Searcher
Use this tool to search for content across multiple social media platforms.
Talk to Books
An experiment in artificial intelligence that lets you search Google Books for human-like responses to your questions. As Google explains, "When you type in a question or a statement, the model looks at every sentence in over 100,000 books to find the responses that would most likely come next in a conversation."
TinEye
A reverse image search engine that can help you determine whether a picture has been altered.
Wayback Machine
Frequently used by researchers and historians, the Wayback Machine lets you search for archived versions of websites to see what they contained in the past.
Wolfram|Alpha
Calling itself a "computational knowledge engine," this site specializes in retrieving quantitative data. (For search tips, see 10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram|Alpha and 23 Cool Non-Math Things You Can Do with Wolfram|Alpha.)
You can also try Goofram to search Google and Wolfram|Alpha simultaneously and get side-by-side results.
2lingual
With this site, you can perform a Google search and get side-by-side results in two different languages.