Other languages can search more efficiently if you write a more efficient search in them, but Prolog can search more efficiently if you write a more efficient search in it, too.

"That's it. On backtracking, this generates increasingly longer lists Ls, and invokes p/1 only on lists of bounded length. Bamm! Iterative deepening. [..] asymptotically optimal under very general assumptions, and you can make it easily available in Prolog yourself. I guess mostly for this reason, the default execution strategy is kept extremely simple. When needed, you can easily implement other search strategies on top of it." - https://www.reddit.com/r/prolog/comments/47fchf/why_depthfir...