Search engines allow us to find and filter out relevant information on the internet. If doing business is "to know what people want and give it to them", then successful search sites managed to get the correct formula.
Top three search sites register more than 90 percent of all search engine traffic. According to
comScore's press release, Google takes 62.6%, Yahoo 18.9% and Microsoft (Bing/Live/MSN search) 12.7% in US. Taking country-specific versions into account, dominance of the top three is replicated almost entirely to other countries.
It may be that the powerful search algorithms make these sites popular. Nonetheless, local taste, language nuance and cultural contexts seem to be other deciding factors.
According to
iResearch China, the top search sites in China are:
Baidu 百度 (76%), way ahead of Google (18.9%), followed by
(Tencent's 腾讯) Soso 搜搜 (3.2%) and
Sogou 搜狗 (0.9%). Baidu 百度 continues to lead the market with its online marketing innovations.
In
the web search market of Japan, with first-mover advantage is
Yahoo! Japan (Yahoo!カテゴリ), beating Google. It is operated by the Japanese telecommunications company Softbank.
As for
the case of South Korea, local players
Naver.com (네이버) and
Daum.net (다음) account for 77% and 10% of the local web searches respectively.
