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THE SEARCH ENGINE MAP

The Search Engine Map

Welcome to the Search Engine Map. Here you will find all search engines which offer English-language results that the world has to offer, what type of search engine they are and where they get their organic results from.

The World of Search Engines

Search engines have become the web's most useful online tool, they are the glue that holds the internet together. Whether you're on the look out for answers, to learn new things, to get from point A to B, or a whole host of other things, navigating the complex web has become simple thanks to search engines. Our access to information has become a critical part of our everyday lives, and as the web continues to expand, our reliance on search engines only gets greater.

The Inspiration

The concept for the Search Engine Map comes from two questions which we are often asked: "What's the difference between search engines 'x' and 'y'?" and "what 'type' of search engine is that?" We thought the Search Engine Map could act as a useful source to answer these two questions in a clear and unique way.

The inspiration for the design came from The Internet Map by Ruslan Enikeev. The Internet Map shows the links between websites on the Internet, whereby each site is a circle, its size is determined by its traffic, and its position is based on how strong its links are to other websites. It also has some useful information and statistics on each site.

Search engines vs. metasearch engines

Search engines have their own 'spiders' or 'bots' that go out and crawl the web, which is why they are sometimes referred to as 'crawler-based' search engines. Using links as humans do to navigate the web, they then index and make searchable the pages they discover. Finally, they rank the web pages in accordance to relevancy and quality. There are multiple factors which determine this, ultimately those with a higher score appear higher in their rankings.

Metasearch engines build on top of search engines by using their organic results. They usually concentrate on front-end technologies such as user experience and novel ways of displaying the information, or providing an extra layer of privacy between you and another mainstream engine.

Organic Results

Organic results appear in a list on search results pages and act as the main source of information. On the Search Engine Map the connections between search engines are based on where they get their organic results from. The size of the search engine is relative to the number of metasearch engines that use their organic results.

Contributing, Inclusions an Exclusions

We encourage you to submit issues to the Github repo for this map. Yellow dots on the map represent real (crawler-based) search engines; in order for something to be given a yellow dot they must have a known crawler, one which could be uniquely identified by a webmaster as belonging to the search engine in question and therefore blocked by robots.txt. Indexes built without this, or are unable to show evidence of an independent crawler will be given an orange dot. All other types of search engine i.e. metasearch engines, are given green dots and linked to the indexes which they pull from.

Certain search engines were not included for reasons such as: not providing results in the English language, remaining stagnant for a long period of time without being updated, being of poor quality with technical issues and glitches, not having sufficient information about who they are (particularly when describing themselves as having a privacy focus), having a history of spamming, being a replica of another search engine, and/or pushing an unrelated marketing agenda.

Google Web Search API was closed and replaced with Google 'Custom Search'. This is a limited API in comparison to its predecessor, therefore the 'Custom Search' engines were not included.

Feedback

If you have any thoughts or questions on the Search Engine Map, please get in touch at aloe@searchenginemap.com.

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