What is the picture that comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘search engine’? I bet it’s the Google logo for most of us. It has been a long time since search engines became an essential part of our daily lives. You might be an internet beginner or an internet marketer; either way, you don’t want to use all the search engines available out there. A search engine basically is a site that indexes and gathers information from around the web and directs users to what they are looking for.
We have put together some interesting information on the top 3 search engines according to their popularity. Let’s see the top players in the search engine market in the order of their stats.
1. Google leads the market
Google is undoubtedly the most popular and opted for search engine out there. Google was founded in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Bin as a research project and since then they have been leading the search engine arena. Google has always been good at integrating new products with the Google search in order to make the search experience more engaging. Youtube, Blogger and their own social network Google+ are examples of this integration. Google keeps its position and standards high by continuously making algorithm updates to clean spam from search results. It receives approximately 900,000,000 unique visitors a month and Alexa ranks it as the #1 website in terms of traffic. Google is also notable for its simple and clean user interface which makes for a great user experience.
2. Bing trails but nowhere close
Bing is Microsoft’s own search engine which holds the 2nd position in the search engine market. It is estimated that Bing receives 165,000,000 monthly unique visitors and Alexa ranks it as the #22 website. After Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo, Bing now powers the yahoo search as well. They both are said to be using the same algorithm though search engine results may seem slightly different due to advertising issues. One interesting feature of Bing is the daily changing background image of its interface. Bing has Hotmail integration which helps users insert elements from their search into emails without any hassle. Bing also provides many added features on its homepage to enhance the search experience of its users.
3. Ask fills the position vacated by Yahoo
Just like the name suggests, Ask is a question-answering based search engine which has good popularity for its innovative method of searching the web. Ask is the 3rd most popular search engine since yahoo got merged into Bing. It receives a smaller amount of visitors compared to Google and Bing which is nearly 125,000,000 per month. Ask.com is ranked #52 by Alexa. It has a ‘question of the day’ section which people find very informative in a passive way. Ask is well known for a malicious toolbar that cannot be removed from our browsers once installed. It was also founded in 1996 but did not come into popularity until late. Despite of the number of active search engines that pull traffic, Google still remains the most concerned one from an internet marketer’s point of view. There is a lot of potential in other search engines as well if you actually try to juice it. It has to be noted that other search engines have comparable stats to Google and these are being wasted if you don’t try to rank on them.
