We all know that when it comes to search engine dominance, Google reigns supreme. However, as was discussed in our last article, the history of search, we know that wasn’t always the case. So, the question becomes could Google ever be toppled from its search engine throne? What other search engines are available and unique enough to overtake the king of search?
Baidu
Baidu, the most popular search engine in China, is a strong contender for the top search engine if massive government restrictions were put in place. Baidu is no stranger to limiting search results and governing what the public can find. This is likely the number one reason why Google is no longer the top search engine in China after refusing to comply with these restrictions. Baidu currently handles more than 6 billion searches per day.
Yandex
The primary search engine of Russia beat out Google in its early days and Russia has never looked back. Yandex was initially more popular due to its better understanding of the Russian language. Since then Yandex has initiated a number of tools and programs to keep up with Google’s Gmail, Google Chrome, Google Drive, Maps, and Translator.
Bing
Microsoft’s Bing, formerly Live Search, has always been in the shadow of big brother Google. There is not much to say about Bing other than the partnerships they have with Yahoo! and Facebook to use the Bing search engine to power web searches from their platforms. Bing is the second most popular search engine in the United States with 12 Billion monthly searches.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is the least known search engine of the ones mentioned in this article. However, DuckDuckGo is starting to make waves in the search engine community due to the public’s rising interest in keeping their data private. You can see the marketing of their privacy efforts on their about page. The main difference in privacy is the decision not to track your search history and use it to create more relevant results as Google does. This has helped them develop a cult-like following from users that hold their search privacy in high regard. A big milestone for DuckDuckGo was Apple allowing DuckDuckGo to be used as the native search engine on Safari. As of 2019 DuckDuckGo is reporting over 1 billion searches per month.
Will Google be #1 forever?
While Google holds the vast majority of the market share when it comes to web search, it would not be surprising to see a new contender come into play that revolutionizes the way we navigate the internet. As it stands, it seems unlikely that any of the current competing search engines will claim more of the market share than they already have.
