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February 11, 2013

The Battle of the Search Engines

By Ashley Caputo, TMCnet Web Editor

Google (News - Alert) has become such a popular source of information that many have begun to use its name as a verb in phrases like “just Google it,” or “is it Googe-ble?” In the past few years, other search engines who attempted to battle its supremacy have failed or were simply unable to attain the power that the great Google has; however, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still trying.



Recently Russian-based Yandex (News - Alert) has passed Microsoft’s Bing to become the world’s fourth most popular search engine in terms of the number of queries processed.

According to the latest figures from comScore qSearch, Google is in the lead with more than half of the global market at 62 percent, followed by (but far behind) China’s Baidu with 8.2 percent. Yahoo is in third place with 4.9 percent, Yandex with 2.8 percent and Bing on the bottom with 2.5 percent.

For the past year, Yandex has been neck in neck with Bing until November 2012 when Yandex processed 4.62 billion search requests as opposed to Bing’s 4.48 billion, which left them both tied in the market at 2.5 percent.

It wasn’t until recently that Russia began a rapid growth of Internet usage, and according to Yandex, that is the reason why the company’s searches grew. Yandex is used in countries such as Kazakhstan, Belorussia, Turkey and the Ukraine, where the Internet is just beginning to become widely used.

Bing, on the other hand, is promoted and advertised globally by Microsoft (News - Alert), one of the oldest and most dominant software companies in the world. Even with its reputation and enormous revenue, Bing has already begun to lag behind before Yandex even reached its peak on the market, which could be foreshadowing the future of Microsoft’s beloved search engine.

Before search engines can even attempt to compete against Google, they must find a way to at least reach the second place mark, which proves to be difficult as well. But with the bar set so high, it seems that being the top search engine might be unattainable, even for top companies like Microsoft.




Edited by Allison Boccamazzo
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