I work for Mojeek(.com) who have an independent index of 5 billion pages. You can count the number of search engines who maintain their own English index on one hand. Google and Bing are the obvious ones.
In the search results we offer buttons to look elsewhere, you can customise which search engines those buttons are.
These smaller engines obviously have less coverage, partly due to cost, partly due to being blocked on larger websites who whitelist their preferred UAs. It's good that there's the likes of DDG and Ecosia but ultimately they're feeding off Bing's index.
All I'd say is if people are interested in alternatives, try a search or two on the alternatives. The search engine market is huge and providing breathing space for the alternatives means people giving them a chance.
In the search results we offer buttons to look elsewhere, you can customise which search engines those buttons are.
These smaller engines obviously have less coverage, partly due to cost, partly due to being blocked on larger websites who whitelist their preferred UAs. It's good that there's the likes of DDG and Ecosia but ultimately they're feeding off Bing's index.
All I'd say is if people are interested in alternatives, try a search or two on the alternatives. The search engine market is huge and providing breathing space for the alternatives means people giving them a chance.