Google is the number one search engine. Used in 70% of all searches and cornering nearly 85% of the mobile traffic market share, it is hard to compete with. Additionally, it regularly upgrades its algorithm (to feature snippets, for example) making it unnecessary for users to resort to any other search engines. We look at the main reasons why Google remains the most popular search engine.
Google Provides the Goods
The key factor that keeps Google on top is that it provides the search results users are looking for. You can verify this for yourself by trying some of the other search engines. Google has made customer satisfaction its core business principle. Users are looking for accuracy and relevancy with every search and have come to rely on Google’s proven track record of delivering exactly this. This ensures that they retain their customers.
SEO Marketing
The disadvantage of using Google is that other businesses in your industry are competing with you to reach the same traffic. However, as long as Google leads, you will still be partaking in the multitude of organic and/or paid-for traffic it generates, which is the lion’s share of the market.
Most businesses are familiar with SEO and have initiated a market strategy to improve their ranking on Google. If you haven’t discovered SEO yet, find out how you can rank higher in Google using the expertise of a company that deals with SEO daily for their clients.
Google Analytics is free for Google users. This allows you to build a profile of your ideal customer so that you can improve your content and increase your SEO ranking.
Geo-location Targeting
When searching for a service or product locally, the user expects local, custom results based on their search intent. Google supports small businesses by combining proximity with geo-location search capabilities. These are then matched with Google Maps to make navigation simple for their users.
Speed
The Google search engine can generate millions of results in record time. It takes a mere 0.19 of a second. The technical infrastructure ensures that every user experiences super-fast speeds that are virtually instantaneous. Even when Google experienced a fire at one server site, which caused a loss of all the hardware at that location, its results were unaffected.
Google Versus the Competition
Bing is the next highest search engine worldwide and captures less than a third of traffic. Yahoo follows with a 3% share. Bing powers Yahoo so their look is very similar and modelled on Google. Ask.com has less than a third of a percentage of users globally. It is powered by Google.
Baidu is the top Asian search engine with three quarters of the Chinese market. However, it blocks pro-democracy sites and censors images. It may be useful for a seller working with this market.
DuckDuckGo promotes its stance on not storing any user search information. Although this may be a plus from a security perspective, it does not take you to preferred sites that you want to be remembered. It accounts for over 26 million daily searches.
When looking for videos, many people turn to YouTube. YouTube provides its users with more than a billion hours of video daily and has over two billion users monthly. An interesting fact is that YouTube has belonged to Google since 2006, giving them control of the top two search engines. It is easy to see why billions of users turn to Google every day for their online searches.