The Most Popular Search Engines

For the most possible site visitors, you will want to be listed on as many search engines and directories as possible. To save time, be sure to keep track of your search engine ranking on these major search engines.

Google is the most popular with the most relevant results
Yahoo uses Google results as well as their own directory results
AOL uses Google results and is used by AOL customers
MSN uses Looksmart results and is connected to Hotmail
Ask Jeeves/Teoma allows you to type a phrase or question
Overture includes Go.com powered by Google
InfoSpace powers Dogpile, Excite, Webcrawler, Metacrawler
uses results from Google, Looksmart, Inktomi, Ask Jeeves, About, Overture, FindWhat, FAST, Teoma
Netscape uses Google results
Altavista was very popular and still is on the West coast
Lycos was very popular and is connected with Hotbot
Earthlink uses Google results and is used by Earthlink dialup Internet users
Looksmart - MSN, About.com, AltaVista and other leading sites use LookSmart's search results
Alltheweb is powered by FAST
Open Directory Project is a human edited directory that lists websites by categories

Yvette Kuhns, Power Pages Web Design, June 5, 2003

Qsearch tracked the actions of one million U.S. Internet users to provide the following statistics, first reported by SearchEngineWatch.com.

The following are the percentage of total searches for each of the major search engines:
Google - 32%
Yahoo! - 25%
AOL - 19%
MSN - 15%
Ask Jeeves - 3%
Others - 6%
( SearchEngineWatch.com, August 1, 2003)

This means that 75% of all searches by U.S. Internet users are powered by the database results of one search engine company, Google.

Update July 31, 2007: Google is still most popular. MSN Search (powered by Windows Live) and Yahoo are very popular. Ask (powered by Teoma) is still up there.

Update September 11, 2009: Google is still most popular. Microsoft renamed their search to Bing and is still competing with Yahoo. Ask is still used. The popularity varies by location but these are the big search engines in the United States.

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