Google market share in the US currently stands at 63.8 percent, with Bing (including Yahoo’s search volume) coming in at 33.5 percent, according to January 2016 comScore data. This makes Bing a credible competitor to Google in the US, but the story is quite different internationally, where Google is dominant in nearly every country, other than China (Baidu), Russia (Yandex), Korea (Naver) and the Czech Republic (Seznam).
Google is the big dog in traditional search, but it would be wrong to think that is the end of the story, as Google faces competition on many different fronts.
In today’s post, I review Google’s “other competitors” to illustrate how this shapes Google’s view of the world and how this view impacts your digital marketing strategy.
What business is Google in?
First, though, let’s establish some context by discussing what business Google is in. Most of us think of Google as a “search engine,” and we tend to think of that as a website where you go to a search box and enter a search query. For some of us, the definition has evolved to include using voice search commands to execute a search.
However, if you look at Google’s About page, here is the famous quote that anyone who follows the world of search has seen many times: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
This suggests that the search engines themselves hold a somewhat broader view of what they do — one that isn’t tied to a search box, or even the use of search commands in one given application.
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