What are 10 of the most popular search engines still being used in 2018?
In this brief guide, we will have a look at 10 of the most popular search engines in use today. Whilst in the UK we are likely to use Google and Bing for almost all of our searches, there are other search engines from around the globe which deal with millions of queries every day.
We will also have a quick at some of the other tools which the companies include for business owners and searchers.
1) Google
With over 90% of the market share worldwide and over 80% in the UK, Google is easily the biggest and most used search engine on the planet today. With an ever-changing algorithm and constant updates to improve the quality of the results it serves, it would be very surprising to see anyone overtake them in the market share stakes.
They also provide lots of extra tools and benefits which are great for businesses and searchers alike, including the Google My Business platform (which I cover in this blog post) which can help businesses appear in local searches and helps for ranking in the ‘Map Pack’.
Google maps for searching physical locations, image searching, and the introduction of featured snippets and rich cards using schema markup brings crucial extra details to certain searches, such as reviews, event dates & how-to guides.
2) Bing
The Bing search engine, which is owned by Microsoft, while obviously not as popular as Google, still has many users and is second in the UK market share with around 12% (3rd with just over 2% worldwide).
Bing comes as the default search engine in Microsoft browsers such as Microsoft Edge and versions of Internet Explorer, so a lot of people who use those browsers will automatically use Bing unless they decide to go elsewhere for their search queries.
Bing have also followed in Google’s footsteps with some of the features which they offer such, Bing Places (similar to Google My Business), map, image and video search.
3) Yahoo
Yahoo has been around since the mid 90’s and is owned by telecommunications giant Verizon. Yahoo’s market share is just over 2% both worldwide and in the UK.
While still a relatively well-known brand, they are more widely known for their free email services, despite many of the users getting their accounts hacked in what is one of the biggest known data breaches of all-time.
After closing their online business directory in 2014, they now offer a local listings management service to US businesses only.
4) Ask
Originally called Ask Jeeves (sadly Jeeves the butler no longer makes an appearance), the search engine was originally founded in 1996 and was estimated to have a 0.02% market share in the UK earlier in 2018.
Ask was originally intended to be a question and answer based search engine, and despite making a switch to a more standard algorithm based model, they returned to the Q&A format, shifting their focus to mobile search and mobile apps.
5) Baidu
This is where it gets a bit more interesting. While Baidu certainly isn’t a household name across the UK, it is easily the most popular search engine in China, with a whopping 66% market share, and 0.85% worldwide.
Founded in 2000, Baidu is on record as being the 8th largest internet company based on revenue worldwide, which is estimated at over 84 billion Chinese Yuan.
The search engine actually has a huge suite of tools for searchers and businesses, such as maps, news, music & video search, plus a range of community and developer tools.
6) Yandex
Yandex, much like Baidu, is not a search engine which will be well known across the UK, but is a huge player in Russia, pipping Google to the highest market share with just over 52% compared to Google at 43%.
Much like some of the other big companies, Yandex also provides a business directory similar to Google & Bing, image, video and map search, plus a webmaster set of tools for getting your site into the Yandex index.
7) DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is aimed at searchers who have their privacy as the main priority. Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo currently has around 0.57% market share in the UK and around 0.33% worldwide.
In their CEOs own words “When you search on DuckDuckGo, it’s like every time you’re a new user and we know nothing about you,”. The aim of this is to prevent personalised and localised search results.
They also provide an image, video, map and news search, and use pull data from Yelp to populate the searches.
8) Wolfram Alpha
Founded in 1999, Wolfram Alpha is positioned as a computational knowledge or answer engine and is widely used for complex searches including mathematics, science, technology, nutrition and engineering based searches.
Wolfram Alpha uses a huge knowledge base and AI technology to provide calculations, inventions and historical figures to millions of students & professionals worldwide.
9) AOL
AOL was once one of the biggest internet companies in the world, providing internet access to millions of people around the world. The company was purchased by Verizon in 2015, and despite still sitting in the top ten search engines, they have just 0.05% of the worldwide market share as of September 2018.
Despite still being positioned as a search engine, they now seem to take their search results from Bing.
10) Naver
Naver is the South Korean search engine, and has an estimated market share of 78% in South Korea, and 0.07% worldwide, putting Naver in the top 10 most popular search engines in the world as of September 2018.
Founded in 1999, Naver provides plenty of tools for users and businesses in Korea, such as advertising and small business tools.
Bonus #1) Ecosia
Ecosia, I feel deserves a mention for its well-intended purpose, with its tagline of ‘The search engine that plants trees’. Based out of Berlin, Germany, Ecosia donates 80% of all its surplus income to conservationist charities, with the primary aim of planting more trees.
Bonus #2) Social Mention
Social Mention is a very different type of search engine to all the above options. As a ‘Real-time social media search & analysis’ tool, it provides results from various forms of user-generated content, such as social media and photo sharing sites.
With the seemingly infinite amount of social and blogging platforms available today, this could be an excellent tool, especially as it shows you handy stats on the search results such as top sources and top hastags used in the results.
