Posted: March 13, 2015
The World Wide Web offers hundreds of ways to search its content. In the United States, the top search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL, but at a global level, Baidu creeps in and takes a large portion of the market share. We’ll walk you through how each of the search engines fares and what that means for your online business.
Google is the No. 1 search engine in the world. As of November 2014, Google had a strong lead with more than 53.7 percent of the global desktop search engine market share. For tablet and mobile devices, there’s simply no contest, even on the global level, as Google dominates with more than 90.9 percent of the market share.
It’s because of this dominance that nearly every online company chooses to optimize content for Google’s algorithms. When the whole world appears to be searching on Google, then the search engine must be doing something right. And your company shouldn’t miss out on that global domination. By optimizing your website and online content for Google’s algorithms, you could be topping the rankings in several markets across the world. Now, whether it’s wise to optimize for global audience depends on your business and your target group of consumers. A local pizza place with no delivery would be better served on a local marketing level, but to the big brands like Sony, Apple, and even Google, a global audience may mean larger profits.
The desktop search engine market share rankings on a global level, according to Net MarketShare in November 2014, are:
It may surprise many business owners that Baidu is second in the world. If you’ve never heard of the quickly expanding search engine, it may be because it is most commonly used in Asia. While many Americans may not know the name, Baidu is a giant in its own right, and its a pretty big rival for Google. In February 2014, Baidu had only 16.77 percent of the market share. So in less than a year, it has grown 14.55 percent. That’s pretty fast, and it could mean trouble for Google in the coming years.
In the United States, the way the market shares are divided probably won’t surprise anyone. According to comScore, in August 2014, Google had 67.3 percent of the market share, with the rest trailing behind. (Note that comScore does not include mobile devices.)
According to StatCounter, from October 2014 to November 2014, the top search engines showed little to no fluctuation for mobile device search engine market share in the United States. Google tops out at 83.4 percent, while Yahoo remains steady at 10.43 percent. A notable difference to the desktop data, however, is that Yahoo is markedly higher than Bing, which comes in at 5.59 percent. Because mobile device statistics are a little harder to come by, it’s unclear what prompts the drop of the usage of Bing 13.81 percent.
On the surface, it appears that online companies should optimize for Google since it holds the majority of market shares in both the United States and the world. However, a bit of research and data analysis can help you determine whether that is the best course of action. Online tools can help you determine who visits your website, and then you can compare that data with available statistics of what type of visitors use Google, Bing and Yahoo. Of course, if you’re focusing on consumers in Asia, specifically China, it’s likely you’ll want to get on the good side of Baidu. But if mobile device users are your primary target audience, perhaps Yahoo and Google are the way to go. Talk to your inbound marketing company to determine how you can track your users and find out for which search engine you should optimize.