When it comes to search engine market dominance Google has ruled the majority of the market for a very long time, with a 67% market share. Bing is in second place with approximately 16%, a far distance behind Google. Both companies want to be the leader in search, causing a Google vs Bing competition. Combined, these two search engines have an 83% share, which is unbelievable, as there are thousands of search engines. This puts into perspective how dominant these two companies are and why they are the largest competitors.
Many people seem to forget about Yahoo, as there are no longer commercials promoting the search engine but it is now powered by Bing, basically resulting in the same results across both search engines. It appears that both company’s products are being re-branded under the Bing banner. This could be due to the fact that both companies feel that by combining their efforts together it will provide a better chance of going after Google for a larger market share.
When you go to look up information on the computer what do you usually do? Probably visit google.com and start searching for your answers. You hear the saying, “Google it!” all the time when people are asking questions and looking for answers. Do you ever hear the words, “Bing it!” or “Yahoo it!” come out of anyone’s mouth? No, you do not, and this just further emphasizes the fact that Google is the leader by a far margin.
A search engine creates and develops an algorithm that is designed to show the most relevant and useful information related to the users input. This is all done within fractions of a second, making it clear that the system that the use is extremely technical as it is able to sift through millions of results and displays what they believe will be the most relevant and user friendly result. What the average user is not aware of is how the search engines, and especially Google are constantly updating their ranking algorithm and rolling out updates. They do this to keep only high quality results showing in the search engine results, and to throw off the efforts of SEO companies. SEO is an abbreviation of the term search engine optimization, and because of the amount of traffic that Google creates many businesses hire the help of a SEO company to get their sites to rank high in the search engine results for given keywords and search phrases.
Google frowns upon companies paying money to manipulate a websites ranking in the search results, and their constant algorithm updates are a way of keeping SEO companies on their toes, but most importantly limiting the search results to only high quality websites that provide a good user experience as well as valuable information and content related to the search term(s). Bing on the other hand does not publicly make changes, and that could be due to the fact that they are attempting to overtake some of the market share and do not want to turn anyone away form their product while they are on the climb up. This is not to say that they do not constantly update and change their algorithm, we are just saying that they do not make it public knowledge as Google does. Google, or the “Big G” as many refer to it as wants internet marketers and webmasters to know that they do not tolerate low quality and spammy looking sites.
The average consumer all the way up to the seasoned SEO specialist can observe the Google vs Bing battle. Google has the majority of the market and really doesn’t have to flood mainstream media with ads promoting their search engine. The bulk of users just automatically use Google as their default homepage. What you will notice more these days is Bing’s venture into mainstream national TV advertisements promoting their service. They are really making a push to get consumers to switch over and try their service. Their ad campaigns are very simple and straight to the point and seem to be working as they continue to slowly climb up the ladder and gain more users.
So, why is the search engine business so lucrative and why is Google doing everything to maintain their dominance and why is Bing doing everything they can to climb higher? The answer is simple, and that is MONEY! Google and Bing make money every time a user clicks on an ad within the search results. When you are looking at search results there are results on the right side column and main results. The first few results are typically ads followed by the organic results that the search engine shows. All of the results on the right hand side are paid advertisements, and companies that place these ads only pay when a visitor clicks on the ads, then being redirected to the advertisers website.
Those ads bring in millions of dollars in revenue on a daily basis. Companies bid for top placement and some of the most competitive keyword terms can fetch as high as $25 – $50 per single click, and when you then look into the amount of search volume each search term can produce you can see why there is such a push for the title of search engine leader. As time passes, you will notice that Google and Bing both adjust and redesign their search engine results to display more ads in prominent placements in an effort to bring in more revenue.
As long as Google continues to dominate and as long as the advertising revenue continues at these high levels, Bing will continue their efforts to climb to the top and take a larger piece of the search engine pie. The Google vs Bing battle will keep going strong and it will be interesting to see how it plays out over the years. These two companies are really the only major competitors in this arena and both sides will continue their efforts. Google does not want to lose any more ground, and Bing is clawing towards to top, so it is crystal clear that neither will back down any time soon.
