Google is without a doubt the leader in the search engine market. Both the indexing engine and the entire giant network of interconnected services from the Californian Mountain View company have almost monopolized the internet marketing market. Positioning a company website on Google or using the Google Ads advertising system, and – then – Google Display Network and Display & Video 360 are nowadays largely a necessity at certain stages of the development of a given business.
However, many marketers and SEOs forget that the Google network, although by far the most popular, does not handle one hundred percent of internet search traffic. The presence and good presentation of the company’s website in competitive search engines is also important – it will allow you to attract traffic and potential customers from sources that are sometimes ignored by the competition.
Microsoft Bing
The second most popular internet search engine in the world. Bing was founded in 2009 as a development of previous Microsoft services, such as Live Search, and even earlier MSN Search – you could say that the Redmond company made an ordinary rebranding. The name of the search engine is sometimes ironically referred to as an abbreviation of Bing Is Not Google, which apparently functions in Microsoft itself as an internal company joke.
Please note that the search engine is built into Windows – the most popular desktop operating system in the world. Thanks to the agreement between enterprises, Bing also largely powers the Yahoo search engine – this former Internet hit (although mainly in the US), according to StatCounter, today has about 1.5% of the market share.
Naturally, due to the common producer, Bing supports search using the Microsoft Cortana virtual assistant. Less obvious, however, is that Bing is what Amazon Alexa uses.
Bing is a search engine that is part of a large package of services. For marketing and e-commerce, we get the entire Microsoft Advertising infrastructure, which works in a similar way as Google Ads – it has millions of customers and huge sales potential. However, even in its basic form, it is worth taking care of proper positioning in the Bing search engine – it is a service associating millions of users around the world.
Bing is set as the default search engine in Microsoft Edge and can be selected as the main search engine in Firefox, Edge, Google Chrome, and Safari.
Useful tools for the marketer:
– Bing Webmaster Tools
– Microsoft Advertising
Yandex
Yandex has existed in various forms since 1990, but as yandex.ru it was officially presented in 1997 – so it was formally established a few months earlier than Google. According to one theory, the name is self-ironic and comes from the Yet Another Indexer (another indexing tool).
As a search engine aimed at the Russian-language market, it has achieved considerable success, currently serving more than 50% of traffic related to Internet searches in the territory of the Russian Federation. Naturally, of all search engines, Yandex is the best at processing Cyrillic characters. Like Google or Microsoft, Yandex offers a number of other options and functionalities in addition to the search engine – from a web browser, through a GPS-based navigation system, cloud storage space, to an extensive display advertising network.
The version for the Russian market can be found at yandex.ru, while the western version can be found at yandex.com.
If your customers are located in the Russian Federation, you cannot afford to disregard the search engine used by tens of millions of Internet users. Yandex also supports the Yandex.Direct network, which is a system that displays ads, among others, on the search network – similar to Google and Bing.
Yandex can be set as the default search engine in the Microsoft Edge browser and (when added to the list) in Google Chrome.
Useful tools for the marketer:
– Yandex Webmaster Tools
– Yandex Metrica – yandex equivalent of Google Analytics, completely free, just like GA
– Yandex.Direct
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a search engine that was established in 2008. Its original name comes from the popular children’s game. The search engine is also available at the easier-to-enter addresses duck.com and ddg.gg. DuckDuckGo is gaining market share slowly, but is growing steadily – in 2021, nearly 100 million inquiries are entered into it every day.
DuckDuckGo uses a completely different model than Google or Bing. DDG does not collect data about the user and does not profile search results – it displays the same results to everyone, regardless of the previous activities of a given person in the network. Focusing on privacy is the main reason why the project is steadily increasing its popularity – some Internet users do not feel comfortable with the fact that various websites, search engines and applications collect a lot of data, even if they are anonymised and do not allow the identification of a specific user.
Disabling profiling has both advantages and disadvantages. The user is thus cut off from the content (or at least not getting it right away), which statistically most likely hits what he was looking for. Profiling in the context of searching for products or information makes purchasing sense and clearly facilitates finding data quickly.
DuckDuckGo mainly uses its own solutions, such as the DuckDuckBot crawler, but also many external sources – including Binga. This means that by optimizing the page to best meet the requirements of Microsoft’s search engine, you also help in positioning the site in DDG. The above-mentioned Bing Webmaster Tools comes with the basic help – with it you can check errors and see useful tips.
If you run a local business, make sure you have Apple Maps in your maps – DDG uses the AM database for this purpose, thanks to which your business will be displayed to users of both search engines.
In Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari, DuckDuckGo is one of the default search options – just select it as the main search engine in the settings.
Amazon
Interestingly, when it comes to searching for products, Google has been losing to another big player – Amazon for several years. According to Jumpshot reports, already in the second quarter of 2018, the e-commerce giant reached 54% of internet shopping traffic. For this reason, Firefox has allowed the use of Amazon Search as the default search engine for a long time. It does not matter much for the service sector or content websites, but when it comes to the typical sale of products on the Web, the presence on the Amazon platform is of great value for producers and stores.
YouTube
In many cases, YouTube is also an important source of traffic. Although it is not strictly a sales portal, as the largest video site in the world, YouTube is a great tool for increasing brand awareness. Millions of customers look for reviews there, watch unboxing, discuss product quality or customer service. Therefore, it is worth at least monitoring the buzz around the brand on YouTube, and it is best to focus your content activities on constant presence on the platform and proper brand exposure.
