There is no disagreeing that Google is the most dominant search engine for internet users in most parts of the world. Recent studies show that Google has an 88% share of the market for desktop and mobile searches in the U.S., and there is no sign of this changing.
At this level of market share, about 70,000 searches being made every second, 5 billion searches every day, and 2 trillion searches per year on Google. Those are crazy numbers and impressive stats, right? If you have any doubts, just Google it!
It might be a shocking surprise for many people, but Google is not the only search engine available on the Internet today! In fact, there are a number of alternative search engines that want to take Google’s throne but none of them is ready (yet) to even pose a threat. Here's a list of the top 10:
Yahoo
Ask.com
Ecosia
Aol.com
Internet Archive
Let's review some of the alternatives that shouldn't be neglected in your marketing efforts if you don't want to miss potential clients, and especially if you wish to go global:
Bing
Bing was created in 2009 as a response to Google by Microsoft. And it somewhat succeeded in terms of being a relevant search engine, but it is nowhere near Google when it comes to being the most used.
Bing is always trying to become a better search engine, and it includes the usual services like web, image, video search, maps, etc.
Interestingly, Bing is the default search engine on all Windows PC’s since it is a product of Microsoft. Bing also has a rewards program that allows one to accumulate points while searching. These points are redeemable at the Microsoft and Windows stores, which is a nice perk. However, despite their efforts, they still did not manage to convince users that their search engine can be as reliable as Google.
According to Alexa, Bing is at the moment number 25 in the world’s most visited sites on the internet. The first place belongs to Google.
Some of the advantages are that it ranks home pages as opposed to blogs, crawls hidden and unhidden content alike, and has outstanding video indexing.
The main disadvantage is that it provides slower and less relevant results in comparison to Google.
Baidu
Also known as the “Chinese Google”.
Founded back in 2000 by Eric Xu, Baidu is the most used search engine in China, and it also has some users in the US, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea.
It has the standard search engine features like web search, audio search, image search, etc., and also offers services such as news, maps, cloud storage, and more.
Some of the advantages of using Baidu are that it offers amazing features and high-quality search results. It also has lots of advertising options for businesses.
When it comes to disadvantages, one of the biggest ones is government censorship which leads to integrity questions of the search results.
Yandex
Also known as the "Russian Google".
Yandex is a search engine that mostly operates in Russia with more than 60% of its market share in the country. It launched fairly early in 1997 and since then has a presence not only in Russia but countries like Ukraine, Turkey, Belarus, China, Germany and Kazakhstan.
According to Alexa, Yandex.ru is among the 30 most popular websites on the Internet with a ranking position of 4 in Russian.
Yandex prides itself on presenting the company as highly technological offering intelligent products and machine learning-powered services.
When it comes to services it offers, it has maps feature, music feature, online translator, a cloud storage service, money feature, and other services. The search engine is available both in Cyrillic and English.
The advantages of Yandex are that it delivers relevant search results locally, has a unique image search option, and can be customized for different countries.
Disadvantages include reaching people out of the before mentioned countries and collecting data from users just like other search engines.
Naver
Also known as the "South Korean Google"
Naver is a South Korean search engine that was formed in 1999 and the first portal in Korea to have its own search engine.
It offers a lot of services like email, news, online Q&A, etc.
As of September 2017, Naver was responsible for more than 70% of all web searches in South Korea. Businesses interested in that part of the world should strongly consider using Naver for their inquiries.
One of the biggest advantages that Naver has on this market is that its algorithms are built around the Korean language making it produce more relevant results than other search engines.
The disadvantage is that it can’t be compared to Google at crawling and indexing.
DuckDuckGo
According to DuckDuckGo traffic stats, they are serving on average 47 million searches per day but still their overall market share is constantly below 0.5%.
Unlike what most people believe, DuckDuckGo does not have a search index of their own (like Google and Bing) but they generate their search results using a variety of sources.
In other words, they don’t have their own data but they depend on other sources (like Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, StackOverflow) to provide answers to users’ questions.
This is a big limitation compared to Google that has a set of algorithms to determine the best results from all the websites available on the Internet.
On the positive side, DuckDuck Go has a clean interface, it does not track users and it is not fully loaded with ads.
The advantages are that DuckDuckGo doesn’t track or keep user’s data, it delivers fast results, and has a clean user-friendly interface.
The disadvantages are that the results are not personalized because of the no data usage, and in that sense are quite limited.
Google may be the most popular choice in search engines, but it may not always be the best choice, depending on your needs and priorities. So, while you might use a single search engine (likely Google), remember that there are millions of others around the world who use different engines to search the web. Different search engines mean different experiences and different things to keep in mind for SEO and paid ads. So, put your website to the test and make sure you do all that you can to reach the people that are looking for you, no matter where they are!
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