Tracking which company controls what percentage of the search engine market share is an important part of what we do at Myers Freelance. Yes, there are obvious answers (Google is number one), but there are also plenty of surprises to be found in the margins that can help a law firm market itself online.
A Break from Past Market Share Surveys
Previously, we used to use Net Market Share for these surveys. However, we couldn’t help but notice that their figures were falling out of favor with some important search engine optimization (SEO) figures, as well as our own data on online marketing.
So for this survey, we moved over to Global Stats’ Stat Counter, which has provided markedly different results than prior editions of our survey.
Here’s the Pie Chart for March, 2019
The data is as recent as February, 2019, and goes to highlight Google’s dominance in the U.S.:
Trends: Upwards and Downwards
We all know that Google is the “default” search engine in the U.S., and has been since pretty much forever. Their 88.6% of the market share is expected and unsurprising.
More interesting to watch are the movements at the bottom of the graph, where Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo exist.
Bing seemed to be moving in the right direction eight to twelve months ago, increasing their market share from 6.69% to nearly 8%, but have since slipped back beneath their prior high and now only occupy 6% of the market.
For most of that time, Bing was largely trading punches with Yahoo! for second place in the search engine world in the U.S.: Yahoo! jumped ahead of Bing with substantial market share gains in August and September – thanks in part to Verizon combining Yahoo! Search and AOL’s ancient assets – but Yahoo!/Verizon has since given all of that ground back as they wind down their search ambitions. We expect Yahoo!/Verizon to continue to fade in the search engine market.
DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, continues to make small and incremental developments as time moves on. A year ago, they occupied 0.52% of the market. Now, they’re at 0.98%. And as internet users continue to become more and more wary of their personal information, DuckDuckGo’s privacy-first search engine is only going to become more enticing.