Search Engines

    Search Engines, you learn about how major search engines reach their market and influence a majority of internet users to avail of their products. Also, in this portion, the importance of having a rank for your site is explained.

  • Search Engines
    • Basics of Search Engines
      • Introduction to Search Engines
      • Search Engine Market Share
      • Major search engines and directories
      • How Search Engines Index and Rank Pages
      • Search engine crawlers, spiders or bots
    • Importance of Search Engine Optimization
    • Difference between search engine positioning, optimization and marketing

Search Engine Market Share

    What is the search engine market share? Which authorities produce such information that can be viewed by the public, and how do they do it? How significant is this data when it comes to
search engine optimization seo? These are only some of the questions that are hopefully answered as market shares are discussed in this section.

    One way to describe search engine market shares is like how a movie makes it big in the box office. You will know how successful an action flick or drama film can be by the box office sales it has garnered since its opening week. Market shares for search engines simply determine how popular a search engine has become over a period of time, say in months or over a year.

    These statistics also provide information on how many users made search queries on the said search engine. How important is this data? As you know, a search engine needs to have a huge portion of the market share in order to be successful.

    It is not easy to say whether market shares determine who is best, but it can sure guide webmasters as to which search engines they should be focusing their SEO efforts on.

    Who comes up with these figures? How do they do it? Some of the internet sources and authorities that monitor and perform research on these search engine figures are the Nielsen Internet Ratings and comScore, to name a few.

    Take note that not all figures from these organizations will exactly be the same, and the placing or ranking of a search engine may differ across different statistics providers.
How do they get these numbers? As an example, comScore performs research from millions of worldwide and United States internet surfers who participate in surveys and studies that observe their behavior while searching the internet.

    In some instances, statistics are monitored automatically by specialized software in order to determine the market share of a search engine for that specific month.

    ComScore’s research efforts showed that in December 2007 alone, there were 9.6 billion search queries made by internet surfers in the United States. Here are the latest search engine market shares as determined by comScore as of December 2007.

Company Percentage of Search Engines
Google 58.6 %
Yahoo 22.4 %
Microsoft 9.8 %
Time Warner 4.5 %
Ask.com 4.6 %


    These data were gathered based on five major search engine companies from consumers in the United States, according to comScore. From these stats, compared to the previous month of November 2007, the number of search engine queries from the abovementioned sites reduced.

    To further elaborate on that, Google had a 4.3 percent decrease in queries over a period of a month. Yahoo decreased by 1.7 percent, while Microsoft also went down by 4.5 percent. These are only a few concrete examples of how dynamic and ever-changing search engine stats can be.

    Other helpful info you may want to know about comScore’s results for the said month of December 2007: YouTube searches reached more than 1 billion, while eBay users made more than 500 million search queries.

    MySpace garnered 340 million searchers from their users, while FaceBook had more than 100 million queries on their site. Amazon site searchers made more than 200 million queries, also according to comScore.

    When it comes to worldwide search engine market shares, the results are very different. These stats can be found on Wikipedia, and were also gathered by comScore over millions of global internet users.

    According to comScore’s global results, there were over 66.2 billion worldwide internet search queries in December 2007. Here is a summary of the top 5 search engine companies from their stats, from global internet surfers aged 15 and above:

Company Search Queries (million) % Market Share
Google 66,221 62.4 %
Yahoo 41,345 12.8 %
Baidu, Inc 8,505 5.2 %
Microsoft 1,940 2.9 %
NHN Corp 1,572 2.4 %


    As mentioned earlier, Baidu is a very powerful and popular search engine in China, and is currently in the process of expanding to other Asian countries like Japan. The NHN Corporation, on the other hand, is a Japanese-based search engine company.

    Based on these December 2007 results, Google and Yahoo still maintain the top two spots when it comes to the frequency or number of search engine queries made. If you want to know more about these internet search engine stats and updated news, you can check out the site at http://www.comscore.com and browse their press releases.

    In this regard, webmasters should conduct efforts in submitting their links to these major search engines or their directories. More on those are to be talked about in the next section of this chapter.