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A Quick Look at Search Engine Market Share

You hear all the time about how Google essentially has a monopoly on search results. They have even been punished by courts in Europe for what were seen as anti-competitive practices. But just how much of a market share do they have?

According to statcounter.com, Google has 91.75% of global search market share. I am assuming these stats are for free-world markets which have relatively transparent reporting. A search engine named Baidu is the leading search engine in China because the government there has mandated it. So, for the purposes of this post we will leave China out of the conversation.

In this article, I have decided to show our readers a recent traffic report for a site we manage here in the U.S.A. This will give you a general idea of what we see on a daily basis. This sample is pretty much representative of search engine referrals across our network.

You can see that the 90% claim is accurate. What we have also noticed in the last 6 months to a year (or so) is how quickly duckduckgo.com has taken over Bing and Yahoo, two much larger companies who throw much more money into their operation.

Google owns the search space and all webmaster SEO’s should optimize with that fact in mind. Until the government deems Google a monopoly or people change their searching habits organically, Google is king.

If you are new to the world of optimization you should sign up at Google Webmasters. Also, You can read our SEO entries and get free information on how to optimize. We share all of our methods and don’t hide anything. Total transparency.