Updated 18 October 2026: re-checked every engine. Added Staan (the Ecosia–Qwant European index), the EU’s Open Web Index (a research index with no search box yet; OpenWebSearch.EU, 4 Apr 2026), Google AI Mode and Perplexity’s Comet browser. HotBot (now an AI chat site), Excite (no web search) and ChatGPT Atlas (deprecated August 2026) are marked defunct, and Arc Search unverified. Yahoo Japan is Google-powered, not Bing-powered. Refreshed figures for Mojeek, Ecosia, Brave, Copilot, Grok, Doubao, DeepSeek, Genspark, the Internet Archive and regional shares, and removed user counts we could not source.
Updated 16 October 2026: added a further-lists pointer to the community list awesome-hacker-search-engines (see “Why use more than one search engine” below); added a 20-engine at-a-glance table and sections on how many search engines exist and the best engine for OSINT; corrected the engine and own-index counts; updated market shares to StatCounter’s September 2026 figures.
Updated 8 October 2026: added Yahoo Scout (Yahoo's AI answer engine, launched January 2026); marked Ask.com (closed 1 May 2026), EntireWeb (search discontinued) and Stract (offline, domain reused) as defunct; Censys now links to the Censys Platform (legacy search scheduled for deprecation in September 2026); Waldo has pivoted to a paid brand-intelligence product.
How many search engines are there in 2026?
Nobody keeps an official count. Our directory lists 84 search engines that were still running when we last checked, plus 8 defunct ones kept for reference. Only 14 carry our own-index badge; most of the rest show Bing or Google results. Seirdy’s survey says “almost none” of the alternatives to Google, Bing and Yandex have their own results. Seirdy (read 16 Oct 2026)
| Category | Running | Own index | Defunct (kept) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mainstream | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| Regional & country-specific | 11 | 5 | 0 |
| Privacy-focused | 10 | 2 | 2 |
| AI-powered | 21 | 1 | 1 |
| AI search — China | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| Indie & open-source | 4 | 2 | 1 |
| Meta-search & aggregators | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Cause-based & charity | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| Specialty & niche | 22 | 2 | 0 |
| Total | 84 | 14 | 8 |
Six of the 84 are flagged unverified because we could not confirm they still work as search engines: Qmamu, Disconnect Search, Waldo, Arc Search, Ekoru and Boardreader. The eight defunct entries are Ask.com, HotBot and Excite (no longer web search), EntireWeb, Mullvad Leta, Oscobo, ChatGPT Atlas and Stract. Google’s share is tracked in our search engine market share report.
What is the best search engine for OSINT?
No single engine is best for OSINT (open-source intelligence). Start with Google, then repeat the search on Bing, Yandex and a regional engine. Each indexes pages the others miss, and each supports operators the others lack. For devices, old versions of pages or Tor sites, switch to a specialist engine such as Shodan, the Wayback Machine or Ahmia.
| Engine | Unique operator or feature | Own index |
|---|---|---|
before:/after: date filters; site:example.com/path in place of inurl:, which Google no longer runs reliably GIJN (14 Oct 2026) | Yes | |
| Bing | ip: finds pages hosted on one IPv4 address; also contains:, inbody: and loc: Microsoft (checked 16 Oct 2026) | Yes |
| Yandex | rhost: (reverse host, e.g. rhost:com.example.*), host:, mime: and date: Yandex (checked 7 Oct 2026) | Yes |
| Baidu | Chinese-language company, procurement and court records, e.g. site:gov.cn plus the company’s Chinese name Argelius Labs (21 Jun 2026) | Yes |
| DuckDuckGo | Still documents inurl:, which Google and Bing no longer support DuckDuckGo (checked 16 Oct 2026) | No (mostly Bing) |
| Brave Search | inbody:, inpage:, lang: and loc:, labelled experimental Brave (checked 7 Oct 2026) | Mostly |
| Mojeek | An independent general index; Seirdy calls it “the best alternative” to Google, Bing and Yandex for general search Seirdy (read 16 Oct 2026). It also documents inurl: and the date operators since: and before: Mojeek (checked 18 Oct 2026) | Yes |
| Marginalia Search | Its own crawler for small, non-commercial sites that big engines bury Seirdy (read 16 Oct 2026) | Yes |
| Shodan | Searches internet-connected devices instead of web pages; free account Shodan (read 16 Oct 2026) | Yes (device index) |
| Wayback Machine | Archived copies of a page by date; the closest replacement for Google’s removed cache: (see our Wayback guide) | Own archive |
Next step: type your query into the box at the top of this page to get a pre-filled link for every engine, or build engine-specific operators with the Dork Generator. The dorking reference has the full operator matrix.
What Are the Best Search Engines for Each Use Case in 2026?
The search engine landscape extends far beyond Google. While Google handled 89.94% of worldwide searches in September 2026 StatCounter (Sep 2026, read 16 Oct 2026), dozens of alternative engines serve billions of users across different regions, use cases, and privacy preferences. This directory catalogs every actively operating, non-defunct search engine — from global giants to single-developer indie projects.
Mainstream & Regional Engines
Google, Bing, and Yahoo dominate Western markets, but the picture changes dramatically by region. Baidu leads China with about 47% of searches on StatCounter's September 2026 figures. Naver has 43% of South Korea on StatCounter but 63% on the Korean tracker InternetTrend, so who is first depends on how you count. Seznam remains the leading local engine in the Czech Republic. Yahoo Japan, which uses Google's technology, has 7.6% of Japan's searches. Sogou (Tencent/WeChat integration) and Haosou (Qihoo 360) round out China's competitive landscape.
Which Search Engines Don't Track You?
Privacy engines have grown substantially as data concerns increase. DuckDuckGo processes over 3 billion monthly searches with zero tracking. Brave Search operates a fully independent index without user profiling. Startpage delivers Google results stripped of tracking. Mojeek maintains a fully independent index of about 9.8 billion pages from the UK. MetaGer, a German nonprofit, runs anonymous meta-search; ad-free use needs a prepaid token key. SearXNG offers an open-source meta-search framework with 240+ configurable sources.
AI-Powered Search Engines
AI search has exploded since 2023. ChatGPT leads with more than 1 billion weekly active users (per OpenAI, August 2026). The Google Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users the same month. Perplexity AI pioneered the cited-sources conversational format. Kagi offers premium, ad-free search that mixes its own small-web index with other indexes. Chinese AI engines include Doubao (ByteDance, 382M monthly users), DeepSeek (130M), Quark AI (Alibaba) and Yuanbao (Tencent), per QuestMobile's May 2026 figures. Grok provides real-time search integrated with X (formerly Twitter).
Indie & Open-Source Engines
A thriving indie search ecosystem prioritizes the non-commercial web. Marginalia Search surfaces text-heavy, non-commercial content with its own crawler. Wiby indexes hobbyist and retro-style websites. Stract, the open-source engine with customizable "optics" filters, has gone offline. Mwmbl is a community nonprofit building its own index. Carrot2 clusters results by topic for visual exploration. These engines often surface content invisible to mainstream search.
Why Use More Than One Search Engine for OSINT?
For research and investigations, using multiple engines is critical. Each engine has different crawling priorities, index coverage, and ranking algorithms. Yandex often surfaces Eastern European content invisible to Google. Baidu indexes Chinese-language sites Google cannot access. Brave and Mojeek find independent web content overlooked by ad-driven engines. Use the Dork Generator to craft advanced queries for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Baidu, or browse the News & Media Archives for journalistic sources.
Further lists. For security-focused engines (servers, vulnerabilities, certificates, code, DNS and more), see the community list awesome-hacker-search-engines by edoardottt. It is MIT-licensed, had about 11.2k GitHub stars on 16 October 2026, and keeps a “Not working / Paused” section for dead entries. Its Credentials and Leaks categories list breach-search services; we link the list as a whole, not those entries. GitHub (read 16 Oct 2026)