While Google Dominates, Others Fight For Second Position
Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 8:35 AM | Leave Comment
While Google still dominates with 65 % of the search engine market share, its smaller siblings [read competitors], Bing and Yahoo and others, have been fighting it out for second place. Bing was able to overtake Yahoo, gaining a distant second position to Google. Bing/MSN/Windows Live searches held 13.9% of the search market and Yahoo stood at 13.5% for the month of August, according to Nielsen Wire research.
Why does it matter for a search engine to be number one, or two or three?
The bigger market share attracts more money in the form of advertisements and other sources of revenue. Google has been way ahead of its competition and has generated vast amounts of money for itself. It has been able to successfully compete to say the least.
Bing and Yahoo combined market share (27.4%) is less than half of what Google commanded last month. The fourth place spot on the search list goes to Ask.com with a scant 2.1% of search and AOL with 2% of the market.
One thing I like to point out…
Yahoo’s search engine is a part of its broader portal which at times seems overly cluttered. Bing probably got an upper hand for the second position in that it looks more like Google, home page being clean and spotless.
It has proven to be a good strategy for Microsoft to let Bing stand on its own two feet and let it remain a part of the MSN portal as well. Looks like the simplicity of Google and Bing websites Home page plays a big part of their respective market shares.
What’s in it for bloggers…
Bloggers have a big stake in the search engine market share as well. They can tune up and optimize their blogs by following guidelines for the three search engines as part of their overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
- Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
- Search Engine Optimization for Bing
- Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
In a Nutshell
If you have a site online, first try to target the larger community of visitors and then optimize it for search engines. Good content will attract more folks to your site and when sporadically spread with keywords will attract search engines as well.
