Looking at the map, what do the highlighted countries have in common?
The answer is these countries have less than 80% of the search market dominated by Google.
Google dominates most countries
A detailed analysis of search engine market share (from December 2014) shows that a remarkably high number of countries have a similar use of search engines with Google being very dominant, and Bing and Yahoo taking a very small percentage. Countries that fall into this patten include:
- Western Europe
- Middle East
- India and some parts of Asia
- Canada
- Australia and New Zealand
- South America
The US search market
The US is unique in having Google dominant but to a less extreme degree, and moderate usage of Bing and Yahoo.
Japanese search markets
Japan is unique with a large following on Yahoo. Although this is a slightly different Yahoo to the Yahoo in the US or Europe.
Korean search market
This has changed very significantly in the last year with Naver losing the dominant position to Google. Daum has also lost market share.
Russian search market share
Google has also gained ground in Russia, as this market used to be dominated by Yandex and Rambler. Yandex is still a very important search engine. Also very well used is mail.ru for search.
Most popular search engines in China
China is the one place in the world where Google is not used. Baidu is the top search engine followed by Haosou and Sogu. Also important here are B2B shopping channels.
Search Engine Market Share Trends
In some ways the search engine market place has simplified with just six key different patterns of search engine usage.
But of course this does not include the local language or even local country variations of each search engine.
Google, Yahoo and Bing all have different algorithms and rules used in different countries and for different languages so this continues to provide a challenge to companies such as ExtraDigital seeking to market into many different countries.
International or multilingual SEO?
If you need help with international or multilingual SEO, ExtraDigiital can provide a free review or a quotation for ongoing work.
Author: Rachel Cornish
