Google vs Yahoo vs Bing

I think it’s safe to assume that most people recognize Google as being the most utilized search engine in the world today. But how does it stack up against some of the other search engines like Yahoo and Bing? Do they produce similar search results? Let’s take a look at the statistics to see how these three really compare in the war of Google vs Yahoo vs Bing.

What are the differences between these search engines?

A common misconception is that all search engines are built and function the same. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. All search engines use propriety algorithms to produce search results based on the user’s keyword queries. In fact, the algorithms are so complex and include so many variables (literally thousands) that they are literally impossible to decipher. These search engine companies keep any details of how the algorithms work top secret and provide very little information to the public on how they can improve their website ranking. This leaves SEO (search engine optimization) companies guessing what strategies or tactics will work when trying to rank for specific keywords.

But besides the search algorithm used by each search engine, what else makes them different from each other? For the most part, it’s the UX (user experience) that the website/platform provides to its users. Below, we’ll look at each of the major search engines utilized by people from around the world.

Yahoo!

Yahoo was launched in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, with headquarters based in Sunnyvale, California. In addition to being a search engine, Yahoo offers other services like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Fantasy Sports, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, and many others. The Yahoo search engine generates approximately 340 million searches per day and receives over 3 billion visits per year. Impressive numbers indeed. Roughly half of their overall traffic comes from the United States, with the next largest audiences coming from Taiwan (5%), the United Kingdom (4%), Canada (4%), and France (4%).

Bing

Owned by Microsoft, Bing was launched in 2009 by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. This search engine had many previous iterations in the past, like MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Since it’s owned by Microsoft, Bing has many integrations with other Microsoft products, like Office, Xbox and Edge/Internet Explorer. Roughly 600 million searches occur every day on Bing, with the majority of those coming from the United States (33%), China (19%) and Canada (17%).

Google

And now we land on the G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time), Google, which currently processes 40,000 search queries per second. That’s not a typo. Per second. That translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion per year. Yes, that’s trillion with a “t”. As you could probably guess, these numbers have grown substantially since their launch back in 1998. At that time, they were only serving 10,000 search queries per day. But just one year later, in 1999, they were up to 3.5 million per day. And by 2004, 5 years later, they had climbed to 200 million queries every day.

So it should come as no surprise that Google is also the most visited website in the world, with a staggering 63 billion visits per year. But are all these visits for their search engine? No. A large portion of their traffic is attributable to other services they provide like Gmail, Google Shopping, and Google News, just to name a few. When comparing mobile to desktop searches, mobile devices have grown significantly every year and now represent 63% of total searches.

Most Searched Queries

What are people searching for on Google? The answer should be easy to guess: Facebook. The 4th most trafficked website in the world, Facebook is the giant in the Social Media sector and generates over 150 million searches every year. The next most searched queries are pretty obvious too; YouTube (142 million), Amazon (87 million) and Gmail (71 million). Below are the rest of the search queries rounding out the top 10:

5) Google (64 million)

6) Weather (43 million)

7) eBay (41 million)

8) Yahoo (39 million)

9) Walmart (32 million)

10). Yahoo Mail (31 million)

So how do the statistics for Google, Yahoo and Bing compare?

Based on all the data provided above, in the Google vs Yahoo Vs Bing fight, it’s obvious that Google dominates the search engine sector. But by how much? As of July 2019, Google own 92.18% of the market share, leaving less than 8% for all the search engines. Bing maintains a 2.39% market share and Yahoo comes in at 1.4%. Other search engines like Baidu have less than 1% of the market share. An interesting fact is that Yahoo is actually owned by media giant Verizon. Another fascinating factoid is the relationship between Yahoo and Bing, which both serve Microsoft ads and produce very similar search results. Yahoo currently sits as the 12th most trafficked website in the world and Bing is in the 32nd position.

Why was Google so successful?

The battle of Google vs Yahoo vs Bing began all the way back in the mid-90s when there were a plethora of search engines available. This included Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSN Search (now Bing), Lycos, Excite and Ask Jeeves. But how did Google come to dominate them all? The answer is quite simple. While other search engines focused on improving the design, depth, and other services provided on their sites, Google focused on engineering its search engine to produce the most relevant search results. Take a look at the screenshots for all the other search engine homepages, they’re littered with content that distracts the user from the main purpose of using the website. Whereas Google had nothing more than a search bar and focused its efforts on constructing a search algorithm that would best satisfy a user’s search query. 

Additionally, Google focused on the infrastructure required to return accurate search results. Back in 1999, it took Google nearly a month to crawl and build an index of 50 million website pages. But by 2012, that same job was cut down to less than 1 minute. Every search that happens on Google must travel approximately 1,500 miles to the data center and back to the user for the results. To accomplish this task, a single search query utilizes over 1,000 computers and takes 0.2 seconds to serve the results.

Once Google won the search engine war, it quickly began to diversify its product offerings and expanded to other markets like email, smart home devices, mobile phones, productivity tools, and many others. The majority of their yearly revenue actually comes from marketers’ advertising platforms like Google Ads (formerly AdWords) and Google AdSense. All of these factors have led to the current stock price of Google being at around $1,500 per share (as of February 2020).