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While it’s no surprise that Google still owns most of the search engine market, these figures are showing record highs for these respective search engines. Other search engines in the report either remain static with Yahoo! remaining at 12.2%, AOL at 1.8% while Ask’s share of the market was down from 3.5% in September to 3.2% in October.

 

 

While this is a US based report, it’s important to look at the bigger picture. Worldwide statistics show that Google has a market share of 82.80% as of May 2011, while Yahoo! has 6.42%, which is 2.51% higher than Bing whose worldwide market share is 3.91%. 

 

In reflecting on the bigger picture, this is great news for Bing who are marking their territory as the US’s second choice of search engine. Yahoo is the third most popular search engine, but worldwide they are still the second choice as an alternative to Google.

 

 

Part of the reason why these two search engines have seen such great success is that they provide users with customised results based on their search activity history. This causes what is known as a filter bubble effect, where a website’s algorithm selectively guesses the information that the user wants to see. This is based on the user’s location, search history and previous clicks. 

As a result of this, users find information which agrees with their viewpoints and they become isolated in their own ideological or cultural bubbles. This causes the user to find personalised results based on what they were looking for. For example, search for ‘The House of Commons’ and it will come up with their website, along with other informative sources. This is due to search engine algorithms which change as the user’s search history is built up over time.

 

 

Internet marketers use search engines such as Google and Bing because they make it easy to find information about users so that marketers can target their advertising. They do this by making their search terms appear more prominently in a search results query page.

 

While Yahoo! has increased its number of clicks by 270% since it introduced its ‘Today’ box in 2009 to personalise the search engine results and make them more efficient, other search engines will have to follow the methods which Google and Bing have applied. In replicating their methods and helping internet marketers with their targeted advertising, search engines will then start to see their own forms of success.