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Search engine comparison: Google vs. Startpage vs. DuckDuckGo vs. Bing
Spiders, also known as web crawlers, search the internet to find results that match your query. If you’ve ever researched the same topic on different search engines, you’ll notice the results can be drastically different.
Most people stick with the default search engine in their preferred browser. But there are many ways search engines stand out compared to one another, from appearance to features.
We’ll explain how search results differ from platform to platform. You’ll also see what types of results you can expect from your queries.
First, let’s look over your options
For this guide, we compared four options. Here’s a quick overview of what some of the biggest search engines have to offer:
- Google: With a 93% market share, it’s the most popular search engine. It’s generally easy to find what you’re looking for, though scammers have learned how to get their ads and sites to the top of the results. Unfortunately, Google isn’t known for protecting your privacy. Expect a good amount of tracking and targeting.
- DuckDuckGo: Known for prioritizing user privacy, DuckDuckGo processes almost 98 million daily searches. There’s no targeted advertising and search results aren’t based on your history.
- Startpage: Dubbed “the world’s most private search engine,” Startpage uses Google’s abilities without the tracking. It feels like you’re on Google, but you don’t have to worry about anyone tracking and selling your data to the highest bidder.
- Bing: Microsoft has beefed up Bing with AI capabilities. The new Bing gives you an improved version of the familiar search experience, providing more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if you want them.
Now that you have a general idea of each search engine let’s delve into how each performs. We’ll test the engines with two searches that have been trending recently.
Here’s how they measure up
Now we’ll conduct the exact search over all the options to see how they stack up.
Since artificial intelligence (AI) is on everyone’s minds, let’s start there. We searched “artificial intelligence” and here are the results.
Google didn’t display any ads for this search at the top of the page. The top results are news stories from various local and national news outlets.
Then we searched “ice cream Phoenix.” Google’s results start with an interactive map, where you can filter down local options by rating, price and hours of operation. That’s handy.
Next came the organic results, comprised of “best of” lists from various sites, which makes sense given this search. Further down the page are a few recipes for ice cream, which doesn’t quite make sense in this context.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo didn’t return any ads for the “artificial intelligence” search term either. Search results include news stories from local and national news outlets along with sites like britannica.com that provide its definition.
For our “ice cream Phoenix” search, DuckDuckGo started with a map. This one is more streamlined than Google’s version, displaying locations on a map without all the frills of filtering. Still, it gets the job done. The same round-up type results come below. No ice cream recipes are found here.
Startpage
Startpage started by displaying ads for the search term “artificial intelligence.” Results included ads for ChatGPT and Grammarly. While the ads are a turnoff, consider that contextual advertising is how Startpage makes money.
The search engine doesn’t collect info on you and sell it. Startpage has a round-up of links to sites discussing AI following the ads, followed by organic news results.
For the “ice cream Phoenix” search, Startpage has the most streamlined results. There are no maps or any other extras. This is simply a list of the same type of round-up lists displayed by the previous two search engines. Depending on your preference, this could be good or bad. The simplicity is excellent, but we do like having the map there.
Bing
Bing also started with an ad, but just one. The ad was for Amazon AWS services to learn how to build an AI-driven app.
It then gave a nice mix of results, including national and local news stories and articles from websites discussing AI. Not a bad bag of results.
For the “ice cream Phoenix” search, Bing starts with a bunch of local ice cream shop listings across the top that you can click to see what they offer. Then it provides a local map highlighting nearby ice cream shops. Finally, it shows the best 10 ice cream & frozen yogurt shops in Phoenix, along with plenty of links to ice cream shop’s websites. Pretty cool.
Now that we’ve gone over the different results you’ll get let’s zoom out a bit for a general overview.
We compared the pros and cons of each search engine
Keep a few things in mind if you want a private search engine. They each have different policies and techniques for protecting your privacy. Some are much more effective at protecting you than others.
Here are the pros and cons of four of the most prominent search engines you can use:
| Search engine | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Offers Incognito mode to stop search terms from being stored on your profile, among other things. Google has detailed settings you can look through to stop different types of data and ad tracking, but be aware data tracking is still at the heart of these services. Here are eight ways Google constantly invades your privacy — and how to fix them. | Tracks every email you type, everywhere you’ve been and everything you search (even in incognito mode). When you use incognito, your device doesn’t store cookies, files or history, but the sites you visit might. It doesn’t hide your IP address when you browse. | |
| DuckDuckGo | One of the best privacy-focused search engines. Doesn’t serve targeted ads. | When you use incognito, your device doesn’t store cookies, files or history, but the sites you visit might. DuckDuckGo’s streamlined index of websites, in comparison to Google’s vast database, makes it challenging to find a vast array of results. |
| Startpage | Doesn’t log your personal information. Hides your IP address completely by changing it to 0.0.0.0. Encrypts all your searches with HTTPS to stop people from snooping. | Does not have helpful information boxes like you’ll find with Google. |
| Bing | Microsoft recently added AI technology to Bing. Most streamlined results of all the search engines. Bing doesn’t share enterprise data with Microsoft. | Still shows you ads — though the ads aren’t personalized. Remember: When you click on an ad you’re at the mercy of the ad website’s privacy policy. |
Tags: advertisements (ads), advertising, AI (artificial intelligence), Amazon, cookies, DuckDuckGo, features, Google, maps, Microsoft Bing, Phoenix, privacy, Pros and Cons, results, search engines, search results, StartPage, targeted advertising, tracking
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