Is Google the one and only ?
It is hard to imagine, but only several years ago the world did not know anything about Google. It was a time of friendly competition between Altavista nad Excite, and Yahoo just set its first community portal,there were some other search engines mostly university ones, as the whole net was rather a bunch of university web pages. Life was simpler.
Today when you see and sense the Google presence even on the streets ( Google cars collecting the data ) it became the part of our life, but is it the only search engine ?
The share of US market for middle of 2010 is as follow :
Google 63 %
Yahoo 18 %
Microsoft 12 %
the others 7 %
It means more less that out of every 10 visitors search engines send to your site,
8 will be from Google, no wonder everyone wants to be on the top of Google, without bigger attention paid to the other engines. I have several places, that rank high in Yahoo, but don’t get much traffic as simply not many of people look for these terms in Yahoo.
The same position in Google would send plethora of visitors, but this situation may change very rapidly, so you must watch carefully the other engines too. More news with Google crossing the borders of privacy may result in sudden switch to Bing or Yahoo.
But America is not the whole world. And there are some places, where noone have ever heard about Google. Outside of US it is popular in most of European countries, and several other like India. Google has never gained the important share of the market in China, where everyone uses Baidu. Well, they may have not much of a choice, as big G wants to leave China, but we have to pay attention to the recent news that the number of internet users in China is already bigger than in US. The statistics may be not very accurate, but it is very probable that soon, if not already there will be more people in the world using Baidu than Google.
Another big country rival is Yandex ruling in Russia and her sattelites.
Most of the post-communist countries in Europe switched to Google, but in Czech republic over 50% of search engine market is taken by local Seznam.
There are several Far East countries including Japan and some in South America where citizens would rather use their local engines to search.
I think this bit of knowledge is useful for web site’s owners, who should be aware of local differences of internet culture in various part of our globe.
if you want to address the people from a specific country it is good to know which search engines are popular in there. In some cases Google advertisement may not be the best solution.
