When people think of using the internet to search for things, they most likely think of Google.  Google is the leading search engine online, with a huge proportion of us choosing to use them to find answers and solutions to our problems or questions. There are, however, several other brands which offer search. Why don’t we take a look at some of the alternatives?

Bing

Bing is heavily linked to Microsoft and is the second-largest search engine in the USA. It has a much smaller audience than Google, sharing its index with Yahoo. Bing is a good choice for web owners to consider when planning their SEO tasks because:

• there’s less ranking competition
• While it has its own index, you can use the same techniques as you would for Google
• Bing is far more open when it comes to discussing their ranking factors
• If your target audience tends to use Bing (such as older people or those in specific countries) you will easily find them more here

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo was founded in 2008, calling themselves the privacy first search engine. They do not store IP addresses or user information – rather different to Google! It is becoming more popular as people seek to avoid handing over all their digital data to big companies.

One drawback on choosing to index on DDG is that you will struggle to match with location-based search phrases since they do not use IP addresses to signal where the user is located.