“We have never been a search company.”
Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO
If the above statement wasn’t true over the last fifteen years, it certainly is now. Yahoo is now committed to the content and ad game, forgoing search to Microsoft. This probably shouldn’t be as big of news as it was. After all, Yahoo used Inktomi search results to help supplement their directory listings way back in the day. And it was only a few years ago that Yahoo search was powered by Google.
So this Yahoo/Microsoft deal led me to wondering about what effects, if any, this would have on the international search universe. I have some fairly extensive international SEO experience having worked with a huge client with 70 locations across the globe and dozens of web sites catering to each individual country. Heck, we even had two Chinese language sites, one in Traditional and the other Simplified.
So while I’m on the topic of China, let’s take a quick peek at the search engine market share there, shall we?
Clearly, Yahoo and Microsoft have lost the battle in China. And despite multiple media reports to the contrary, Google is alive and kicking in the world’s most populous country.
Because of China’s major growth curve per Internet usage, Baidu is now up to 9% of all global search engine usage. Google’s global market share is actually going down due entirely to Baidu and doesn’t reflect the rest of the globe.
Which begs the question, just how is Google doing outside of North America?
What’s that? You’d like to see a chart showing this data?
Ask and you shall receive.
According to ComScore, Google has 60% of the US market, but 67% worldwide. Impressive. Microsoft has made few inroads abroad, and has 3% or less share in the U.K., Germany and Korea. Yahoo has one pocket of overseas influence: Japan, where its search share is 43%, close to Google’s.
In many top and growing Internet countries, including Germany, Canada, Brazil, Turkey and Italy, Google has more than 80% of the search market.
So no surprises there. Google is still the king of the jungle but there are still plenty of country/language specific engines that are very popular in some countries. But that’s another post.
So there’s a 30,000 foot view of the global search landscape as it stands now. Next time, I’ll write about some of the things to bear in mind when working on international SEO.
