Top Search Engines of 2008
One of the most popular questions that I get from people that are interested in doing SEO or PPC today is: “Which search engine is the most popular one?” This is a very logical question. Ten years ago, most business owners knew that if they wanted more customers all they had to do was call the local Yellow Pages representative or a newspaper, choose which ad size they wanted and that was it!
Now that people have dumped their newspapers and phone books in the garbage and simply go to search engines to find what they are looking for, business owners definitely need to know which search engines are the most popular ones so that they can ensure that their business is front and center when their potential customer does the search. Of course, internet marketing companies are always willing to help as well!
So what kind of changes happened in 2008? Here is the information you have been waiting for. Well, we can definitely call it the year of Google, again. Although it wasn’t news to anyone that Google was the most popular search engine, by the end of 2008 Google broken through the 80% market share ceiling! In fact it is estimated that close to 82% of searches worldwide are now done through Google.
While market share of most other search engines remained mostly unchanged the recent gains of Google seem to have come at the cost of Yahoo!, which has been in a steep decline of late and now stands at around 10% in second place after Google.
Now what does this mean to your business? Well it’s certainly good news and bad news. We’re again in the market were you can only deal with one or two organizations like it used to be before with yellow pages and one or two newspapers. Because Google and Yahoo have close to 92% of the market why bother with the other 8%? The problem of course is that Google has a monopoly on the search market and it’s only increasing. This means that if you were thinking of starting a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or PPC campaign it is better to start it sooner rather than later as more and more of your competitors are focusing their sights on Google and SEO and PPC will only get more expensive. In fact PPC costs have been steadily rising at a pace of close to 30% each year over the past 10 years due to consolidation of search engines market and shift of advertising spending to online channels.
