It was recently announced that Google now had a 67% global market share of all online search queries, a truly staggering proportion equating to 11.4 Billion processed queries in November 2012. Google’s share in the US is at 84%, over 85% in Canada and it is at almost 90% in the UK. Its dominance is not limited to the English speaking world either, Google India, Google Germany and Google Hong Kong all rank well in the top 20 most visited sites on the internet. This is the latest growth spurt in a steady climb that has seen Google not only remain firmly on its throne as king of the search engines but glue the crown to its head. How did I find all this out? The same way anyone finds something out. I googled it.
No one is quite sure when Google moved from a noun to a verb but it has quickly become a part of common vernacular like Hoover and Xerox before it. You don’t vacuum clean your carpet, you hoover it. You don’t make copies of something, you Xerox it. You don’t search for something online, you Google it. But Xerox no longer dominates in the way it once did. There are dozens of alternatives on the market and though you still Xerox a document, but you might be doing it on a Canon.
A number of recent studies have claimed that in blind tests people were more satisfied with the results of alternative search engine providers than those of Google, with the search engine giant sometimes placing as low as fifth or even sixth behind a string of competitors, some of which are all but unknown, at least, on the same global scale as Google. While Google are constantly updating and working to improve their algorithms to improve the user experience there have been more and more rumblings among the search community that the King’s throne may not be as secure as it once was. However, any speculation about a coming “coup” is premature at this point. Google’s market share continues to grow and despite the best efforts of Microsoft’s marketing team the next in line, Bing, has less than a quarter of Google’s search figures.
Smart SEO is all about presenting yourself to the most users as often as possible and so for now the smart road is still to follow where Google leads. But if these rumblings continue how long before we see the searching public start to become dissatisfied with what Google’s searches are providing? Given Google’s dominance any change is likely to be slow coming but what will happen if their market share not only stops growing but also start to decline? In ten years’ time will we be googling things on Bing?
Andrew Martindale is one of the Account Managers at SEOhaus. If you would like to stay up-to-date on all of the latest SEO industry news and tips, you can subscribe to our blog here. Thanks for reading the SEOhaus blog!
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