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Best Search Engines For Windows Of 2025 Reviews Comparison

Bonisiwe Shabane
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best search engines for windows of 2025 reviews comparison

A judge ruled that Google created an illegal monopoly because it paid partners to make its search engine the default on phones and mobile browsers. And the bad news continues: The company recently changed its policy to allow tracking you with fingerprinting. But you don’t have to use Google (though it's hard to avoid the code it places on nearly every website you visit). Alternative search engines often give you more privacy and sometimes come with other benefits as well, such as specialized search tools and commitments to charitable donations. The difference in quality of results between Google and other search engines has become a non-issue, too. We've tested the top alternative search engines and included the ones worthy of consideration below.

We focus on standard web search engines here, but you can also read about the new world of generative AI search. AOL is still in the web portal game, giving you a start page that shows curated hot topics in the entertainment, finance, food, health, news, and sports categories. But you can use it just as a web search engine as well. This offering features a slick interface, optional content filtering of potentially offensive material, and good image search filters. It's not the most private search in the world since activity tracking and location are on by default, but you can disable those from a Privacy Dashboard as long as you're signed in with... Yahoo now owns AOL, so your web results will likely be the same in both; they just have different interface tools.

Coming from the innovative creators of the privacy-focused Brave web browser, Brave Search claims “unmatched privacy.” In my testing using the EFF’s Cover Your Tracks Tools, Brave was the most private browser, so the... When I enter a search in Brave Search, my ad-and-tracker blocker, uBlock, doesn’t report anything to block. Brave gets its results both from its web crawling index and “anonymous API calls to third parties.” Brave now gives you a choice of AI-powered or standard web results via its Answer With AI... A Discussions section on the result page features content from Reddit and the like. Finally, Brave's Goggles feature lets you filter your results with parameters like No Celebrity content or News from the Left or Right. The biggest name in private search deserves your attention.

DuckDuckGo (DDG) has a simple privacy policy: “We don’t collect or share any of your personal information.” The search interface is simple, too, and results are on target, though they lack the extensive info... DDG lets you search for images, videos, news, maps, and shopping results. A nice touch is that DDG adds more header options depending on the search term, such as Definition, Meanings, Nutrition, and Recipes. The search service now includes two AI features: Assist, for a generated answer summary for your query, and Duck.ai Chat. The first is similar to AI features in Bing, Brave, and Google. It summarizes web results to give you an answer at the top of the page so that you don't have to hunt down that nugget of information on multiple websites.

Duck.ai lets you have a conversation with a chatbot that doesn't use your input for training. Home » Technology » 20+ Best Search Engines (November 2025) Alternatives to Google Tested I’ve spent the last three months testing over 20 search engines, and Google’s declining search quality isn’t just your imagination. After analyzing 4,500 searches across different engines, measuring privacy features, and tracking performance metrics, I discovered alternatives that actually outperform Google in specific areas. The search landscape in 2025 has dramatically shifted with AI integration, privacy concerns reaching an all-time high, and Google facing multiple antitrust cases. You’re probably here because you’ve noticed Google serving you more Reddit results than actual websites, or you’re concerned about the 2.5 billion data points Google collects about each user annually.

Choosing the right search engine is more important than ever in 2025. With growing concerns over privacy, censorship, and algorithmic bias, users are looking beyond Google’s familiar homepage for smarter, safer, and more specialized ways to search the web. While Google remains dominant—accounting for roughly 94.8% of global mobile search traffic—there’s an expanding ecosystem of alternative search engines that offer compelling advantages, whether it’s enhanced privacy, eco-consciousness, or tailored search experiences. Here’s a breakdown of the best search engines you can use today, what makes them stand out, and who they’re best suited for. Best For: Comprehensive search, accuracy, and advanced toolsMarket Share: ~94.8% (mobile search traffic) Good to Know:In 2025, Google continues integrating its Gemini AI model to power more conversational, intelligent search queries—especially within mobile and smart devices.

Best For: Microsoft ecosystem users and AI-powered results Discover diverse search engines tailored for unique needs, from privacy to academic research, that redefine how you explore the web Most people tend to rely on just one or two search engines that offer three key features: This article's options should help you find the best search engine for your needs. These are mainly web page search engines, but others exist for specific searches. Other search engines exist just for people, images, and, of course, jobs.

Does not track or store user information. Want to know what the best search engines are this year? I’ve got you covered. In this post, I’ll reveal the 17 most popular search engines in the world right now, ranked according to their market share. I’ll also provide a detailed overview of each search engine and share some interesting facts and figures about them along the way. Note: I’ve used data from Statcounter in this post.

In their dataset, market share is calculated based on search engine referrals, i.e. the share of website clicks resulting from searches on each engine. Their tracking code was installed on over 1.5 million websites and over 5 billion clicks were measured. Google is the most popular search engine in the world by a huge margin, with a market share of 90.83%. Search engines are software systems designed to help users find information on the internet by searching through vast databases of web pages, documents, and other content. They use algorithms to index, rank, and retrieve relevant results based on user queries, providing the most relevant, authoritative, and popular results.

Search engines typically include features such as keyword search, advanced filters, personalized results, and the ability to search specific content types (e.g., images, videos, academic articles). Popular search engines often use machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of search results and enhance user experience. Compare and read user reviews of the best Search Engines for Windows currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly. You seem to have CSS turned off. Please don't fill out this field.

You seem to have CSS turned off. Please don't fill out this field. Click URL instructions: Right-click on the ad, choose "Copy Link", then paste here → (This may not be possible with some types of ads) Looking for an alternative to Google Search? We’ve got you covered. Google might be the most popular search engine on the market, but it isn’t the only one.

There are a ton of alternatives to Google Search out there that you can use instead. Below, we’ve listed some of our favorites. Many of these alternatives to Google are ad-free, offer more attractive privacy policies, and still serve up the same high-quality results. So without further ado, here are the best search engines on the market! DuckDuckGo is the perfect choice if privacy is your top browsing concern. A judge has ruled that Google has a monopoly on online search because it paid partners to make its search engine the default on phones and mobile browsers.

But you don’t have to use Google, and there are many reasons not to. Though Google is familiar to everyone, it doesn’t need to know every detail about you and profit from your information. Alternative search engines often give you more privacy and sometimes come with other benefits as well, such as rewards or donations to worthy causes based on how much you search. The quality of results between Google and other search engines used to be a real issue, but now you’d be hard-pressed to find much difference. The greatest contrast you're likely to notice is the ranking of the top results. We've tested the top alternative search engines and find the ones below to be worth your consideration.

Though we feature standard search engines in this article, we'd be remiss not to mention the emergence of generative AI tools in search. These are not only making their way into the big players like Google with Gemini and Microsoft with Copilot, but standalone AI-based search engines are appearing, too. Brave Search, too, has started including AI summaries of your search results. The beauty of these tools is that they're conversational, retaining the context of your search text so that you don't have to keep entering long queries edited to fine-tune your results. They also often produce a specific answer, saving you from poring through web page results. The latest gen-AI search tool to arrive on the scene is SearchGPT, from OpenAI, which is still in prototype.

The other big name in this game is Perplexity.ai, a web search built from the ground up with generative AI. That service, as with many of its competitors, has come under fire for scraping web data from content site owners like Amazon and Conde Nast. We're in the process of testing AI search engines now and plan to detail our favorites in an upcoming article, so make sure to check back. ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini (among others) have successfully made AI chatbots mainstream and serve as viable alternatives to standard web search engines. In turn, the standard search engines from those companies (along with alternative ones) have adopted some AI elements. Bing, for example, now offers the Copilot Search feature, which shows the AI's reasoning process.

Meanwhile, Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews, respectively, provide chatbot-like functionality and a summary of findings at the top of a results page. AI can greatly improve the web search experience. With standard web search, you often need to pore over multiple web pages to find the kernel of knowledge you're after. With AI search, you often need only enter a single text prompt. Furthermore, if an initial answer isn’t quite what you're looking for, you can steer the bot in the right direction with follow-up prompts. You don’t have to keep rephrasing the same query the way you do with standard search engines or with legacy AI voice assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri.

But we aren't focusing on Copilot in Bing or Google's various AI search features here. Instead, we are looking at search engines that run entirely on generative AI. Generative AI and chatbots typically rely on large language models (LLMs) that train on an information set with a specific cutoff date. The search engines we highlight here also use LLMs to understand the text you enter, but rather than basing their results on a fixed knowledge base, they scan the live web for up-to-date information... The better ones even show you their sources so you can double-check them.

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A judge ruled that Google created an illegal monopoly because it paid partners to make its search engine the default on phones and mobile browsers. And the bad news continues: The company recently changed its policy to allow tracking you with fingerprinting. But you don’t have to use Google (though it's hard to avoid the code it places on nearly every website you visit). Alternative search engines...

We Focus On Standard Web Search Engines Here, But You

We focus on standard web search engines here, but you can also read about the new world of generative AI search. AOL is still in the web portal game, giving you a start page that shows curated hot topics in the entertainment, finance, food, health, news, and sports categories. But you can use it just as a web search engine as well. This offering features a slick interface, optional content filteri...

Coming From The Innovative Creators Of The Privacy-focused Brave Web

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DuckDuckGo (DDG) has a simple privacy policy: “We don’t collect or share any of your personal information.” The search interface is simple, too, and results are on target, though they lack the extensive info... DDG lets you search for images, videos, news, maps, and shopping results. A nice touch is that DDG adds more header options depending on the search term, such as Definition, Meanings, Nutri...

Duck.ai Lets You Have A Conversation With A Chatbot That

Duck.ai lets you have a conversation with a chatbot that doesn't use your input for training. Home » Technology » 20+ Best Search Engines (November 2025) Alternatives to Google Tested I’ve spent the last three months testing over 20 search engines, and Google’s declining search quality isn’t just your imagination. After analyzing 4,500 searches across different engines, measuring privacy features,...