[1] Bing sees roughly 8% of searches with Yahoo! at 5%.[2] Google’s Chrome browser has had a helping hand in solidifying this share, as it is also the default browser for many Android mobile devices.

Despite Google’s hold on the majority of search traffic, there is still a third of U.S. searches made on an alternative engine. When we look into the activity of international markets, other native brands are eating at sizable portions of the search engine pie. Here’s a list of 5 search engines to be aware of — outside of those big three.

1. Baidu

Baidu is Chinese equivalent to Google with a variety of internet-related services and products. For many years, China had barred companies like Google from expanding their services into the country, allowing companies like Baidu to secure their foothold and grow. Baidu receives 80% of China’s mobile search traffic, making it the most used search engine in China and the one of largest search engines in the world.[3]

Baidu works closely with the Chinese government and its internet policies. Violating their policies can lead to pages not showing up on Baidu’s search listings. Being familiar with their policies and writing content in simplified Chinese with a .cn domain is crucial to ranking well on Baidu.

2. Yandex

Yandex is a Russian search engine with a large presence in Russia and its neighboring countries. In 2015, Google ran into trouble with Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) competition laws that resulted in a ban of phone manufacturers from preinstalling Google apps – including Google’s Chrome browser.[4] In 2017, Google settled negotiations with Russia to include a choice window between Google Search and Yandex.[5] The active Russian government’s intervention has helped Yandex secure a 56% share of the search engine market.[6]

Yandex divides queries into two categories – geo-dependent and geo-independent. Queries that are geo-dependent will favor sites from that region. This makes it easier for smaller and local businesses to compete against larger global enterprises. Yandex also weighs fresh content as a ranking factor even heavier than Google. Large enterprises are encouraged to constantly push new content to secure their online markets, making SEO highly competitive.

3. Naver

In most free markets, Google has a stark hold over many international markets. However, South Korea’s Naver seems to have found its kryptonite against Google with over 70% of the search market.[7] South Korea’s Naver offers a search service that is unique from its contemporaries. Naver heavily weights content from online users, social media platforms, and PPC in its search rankings, making visibility the key factor to winning a high search ranking.

4. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo has been rising in popularity as an alternative to other major search engines because it does not store user information. Normally, a search engine will adjust search listings to the user’s history and demographic information for a tailored experience. DuckDuckGo is user-agnostic and will show the same search listings to all users regardless of their search history or user location.

Most search engines will return users a listing of pages ranked from most relevant to least relevant. DuckDuckGo takes a different approach by providing users with a list of results that are crowdsourced from other sites. To keep search listings relevant, DuckDuckGo weighs page quality as a key factor.

5. Daum

Daum is another South Korean search engine that shares a lot of similarities with the Naver engine. Daum competes head-to-head with Google as the second-largest search site in Korea and offers an interface that focuses on real-time news and social media updates. Daum’s strategy is to keep users on the front page. In 2014, Daum partnered with Twitter to build a portal for microblogging as users go through search pages. Maintaining fresh content that encourages link sharing and a strong social media presence is essential to gaining attention on Daum.

Taking advantage of the “worldwide” nature of the internet can lead to more search traffic and potential customers for your products and services. While Google, Bing, and Yahoo! maintain massive shares of the search market, knowing how your pages fare on other listings will only serve to strengthen your SEO conversions. This is especially evident in countries with markets whose search habits may be changing in favor of their native search engines.

 

Optimizing your page’s search ranking can be time and resource-intensive. Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone. Start seeing results with your SEO by speaking with an expert today by filling out our form! With 15 years of experience in developing successful SEO strategies, Strongpages has generated significant results for clients in a variety of competitive industries.

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[1]Konrad K. “Google is easily the most popular search engine, but have you heard of who’s in second?”. Digital Trends. https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/google-baidu-are-the-worlds-most-popular-search-engines/

[2]“Search Engine Market Share”. Net Market Share. https://netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx

[3]Imogen U. “Top 5 Chinese Search Engines You Need to Care About”. Dragon Social. https://www.dragonsocial.net/blog/top-chinese-search-engines

[4]“FAS Russia Reaches Settlement with Google”. FAS. http://en.fas.gov.ru/press-center/news/detail.html?id=49774

[5]Ibid.

[6]Brendan M. “How the Russian search market looks now”. Search Engine Land. https://searchengineland.com/how-russian-search-market-looks-283072

[7]Alesia K. “Google vs. Nave”. Link Assistant. https://www.link-assistant.com/blog/google-vs-naver-why-cant-google-dominate-search-in-korea/