And Third Place in Global Search Goes to…
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | January 28, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Chinese search engine Baidu beat Microsoft for third place in the global search market in December 2007, comScore reported late last week. Baidu, which recently relaunched in Japan and has 70% of the search market in China, captured just over 5% of the global search market while Microsoft claimed just under 3%.
The winner was Google, with 62%, trailed at a very distant number two by Yahoo’s 13%. And Ask.com’s 1.1% share and eighth-place spot is threatened by Russian search engine Yandex, which follows Ask closely at 0.9%. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld expresses surprise that three of the engines on the list don’t use the Roman alphabet:
The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet… Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? These market share figures suggest that culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google.
But though English is by far the front-runner when it comes to world Internet users by language, claiming just under a third of all users, China is number two in the list, with nearly 15% of Internet users speaking Chinese. So Baidu’s popularity makes sense, and its expansion to Japan should help it gain more of the world’s search traffic (7% of Internet users are Japanese speakers).
What is surprising is that other local engines aren’t better represented in search share, whether or not the alphabet is Roman. Some of this is likely due to restricted Internet access: Arabic, which saw more than 1500% growth online from 2000 to 2007, is spoken in countries that frequently block or censor the Internet. But Spanish, which is the third most popular online language and is not censored, does not have a local engine represented in comScore’s list. It will be interesting to see if Baidu can continue to capture more of the global search market share and if engines from other countries - like India, which has a huge population and is experiencing a tech boom - will begin to appear on this list.
Topics: International, Microsoft, Search: News |
[…] bookmarks tagged distant And Third Place in Global Search Goes to… saved by 4 others tomthedude bookmarked on 01/28/08 | […]