Lesson 1.1: Search Engines
Article by: Matt Polsky
Google and Bing aren't the only search engines. Thousands of search engines exist. However, search market share in the U.S. predominantly comes from Google.
Statistics from Statcounter show Google owns more than 86-89% of the search engine market share in the United States.
Note: Statcounter receives data from tracking pixels on over 1.5 million websites globally - meaning it's a fairly reliable resource but not perfect.
Below is a quick look at the top and up-and-coming search engines in the United States.
US-based searchers utilize Google more than any other search engine combined. Because of this, our course focuses primarily on how to optimize for Google.
That said, Google is losing trust with content creators, users, advertisers and government entities. The result could cause Google to lose the search game to new and upcoming technology.
Bing
Bing maintains their second-place market share due to defaulting every new Windows-based computer to Bing. Bing, like Yahoo! and others, is primarily an older demographic. Bing injected over $10 billion into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and now utilizes their technology for their conversational search chatbot.
Neeva (Acquired - No Longer Active)
Neeva came from Google's former Senior Vice President of Ads, Sridhar Ramaswamy. Ironically, Neeva did not utilize ads but monetized through a subscription. Neeva was the first search engine to introduce an AI chatbot to answer search queries. Neeva announced it was shutting down operations in May of 2023, and shortly after, it became part of Snowflake, a cloud data platform.
Though no longer active, they are worth mentioning for being a pioneer in AI-generated search results
Duck Duck Go
DuckDuckGo's USP is privacy. However, DuckDuckGo also let Microsoft use its tracking pixels on the platform, which angered many users who thought it was pixel-free. DuckDuckGo removed the trackers in August 2022 but hasn't seen much growth since.
Brave
Brave also takes the route of privacy and takes things a step further by adding anonymized network routing. They're relatively small in the overall market but could eventually make waves.
Reddit is not a traditional search engine, but user behavior is shifting to recommendations from people vs. companies. For example, more users are Googling "best {product name} Reddit" to see unbiased results.
TikTok
It's weird lumping TikTok into search, but studies show users in the 18-25 demographic use the platform for search-related queries. I've also seen TikTok cause extreme spikes in Google searches. It's not a traditional search engine, but some users have started to treat it this way.
In our next lesson, we define SEO and get an idea of the types of search results SEOs can impact.