A search engine is a web application that enables people to find websites, videos, images, and other digital content. The vast majority of search engines are commercial entities that are developed and maintained by companies or individuals.
In the world of search engines, there are many different options. Some of these focus on general content, while others are specialized in a particular field, such as academic research or news. Some of the most popular search engines include Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search, Baidu, and Yandex. These companies all provide user-friendly interfaces with their own unique features and advantages over each other.
Top Search Engines, Ranked by Popularity
Google was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996 and is currently the largest search engine, even bigger than all the other search engines combined. With an average market share between 86% and 96%, Google stands at the top of the list of the most popular search engines in the world. Among the many valid reasons for Google’s top spot are its scalability, speed, accessibility, effectiveness, reliability, and most importantly the search results. And finally, because Google is so popular among users, it has developed an algorithm that ranks websites higher when people are searching for specific terms.
These factors have helped make Google the dominant player in the search engine market
Bing was launched by Microsoft in 2009, as a successor to its previous search engine Live Search. Currently, Bing is the second most popular search engine, with 3.19% of the market share. Microsoft has been trying to make Bing better ever since its acquisition of the search engine. It processes more than 900 million searches per day and offers a variety of features similar to Google. And just like Google, Bing also uses machine learning algorithms to improve results, personalizes recommendations based on your online behavior, and collects data from other sources like social media posts to provide additional insights into what people are searching for.
Baidu is a Chinese search engine and the third-most popular search engine in the entire world. Robin Li and Eric Xu launched the search engine back in January 2000. The search engine is highly dominant in the Chinese market, having around an 80 percent share of the local market. However, outside of China, the search engine has comparatively smaller business. However, its policies are pro-Chinese and censor certain types of content. As a result, it is frequently called the Great Firewall of China. This is also why Google does not have a significant Chinese market share.
David Filo and Jerry Yang originally developed Yahoo in 1994 with the title “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” However, the idea was dropped, and the current name was chosen, which stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Organized Oracle.”
One hard-to-believe fact is that back in 1998, Google founders tried to sell the company to Yahoo for $1,000,000, but the deal didn’t work out. Currently, Yahoo itself is powered by Microsoft’s Bing; hence the search results of both search engines are quite similar.
Yandex is a pro-Russian search engine, just as Baidu is pro-Chinese. The search engine was developed in 2000 by Elena Kolmanovskaya, Arkady Volozh, and Ilya Segalovich. And just like Baidu, the search has strong popularity in the local market but lacks major footprints outside of Russia. Yandex recorded a local market share of 51.66% as of October 2022, while at the same time, the global share of the search engine was around 0.5 to 1.16%.
DuckDuckGo is a lesser-known competitor that focuses on user privacy, which has become a very hot topic recently. It does not track users and has a very simple interface similar to Google or Yahoo! but omits all the unnecessary tracking. Gabriel Weinberg developed the search engine in 2008. Currently, the search engine has over 94,000,000 daily search queries and is constantly growing. The major reason behind this is that major companies exploit user privacy to serve them personalized ads. Due to DuckDuckGo’s refusal to take this approach, users who are interested in alternatives will abandon popular data-collecting search engines for alternatives like this.
Bottom Line
The modern web is highly dependent on reliable search results. Hence choosing the right search engine is very crucial. Several internet search engines compete in the market to solve this problem. Despite Google being the biggest player (even bigger than all the others combined), others are also slowly but steadily increasing their market share. If you want to get featured in Google’s search results, then you are in the right place. Tash’heer is a digital marketing agency that helps companies like yours get noticed in the digital space. Reach out to us today to get started.
About the Author: Alishba
