Since the introduction of Google Search in 1997, the company has continued to dominate the search engine market. Perhaps no other company has achieved what Google has accomplished. It became so well-known and valuable as a tool that its name became a common term: "Google it".
This phrase is now synonymous with researching the internet and finding the desired information.
Today, according to GlobalStats research findings, Google commands 91.8% of the world's internet search requests, leaving far behind its competitors Bing (Microsoft), Yahoo!, Yandex and Baidu. Even in Greece, the company is used by 98.5% of electronic devices, with Bing representing just 0.93%.
Googleplex, the corporate complex of Google and Alphabet Inc., is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Google and its competitors in the global market
The history of Google began in 1995 at Stanford University in America by two students, Larry Page, who was going to study there and Sergey Brin, who was already studying at the educational institution. Since 1997, the two students founded Google Search, the company has dominated the search engine market.
With its parent company, Alphabet, set to be one of the world's largest internet companies by 2022 with a market capitalisation of $1.3 trillion, Google is also seeing high revenue with a 2022 profit of $279.8 billion.
However, although Google is the most frequently used search engine worldwide, in some countries, according to Statista's charts, the other search engines are ahead of or competing with it to some extent.
As of the third quarter of 2022, over 62% of Internet users in Russia used Yandex, while Google users were almost 36%. In China Baidu was the most used search engine as of December 2021, with nearly 86% of Internet users in the country accessing it.
In other countries, such as Japan and Mexico, people use a combination of Yahoo! and Google. According to Statista, in the first quarter of 2022, nearly 56% of respondents in Japan said they had used Yahoo! the last four weeks. In the same year, over 27% of users in Mexico said they used the same search engine.
Bing, Google's first competitor
Bing is the main search engine that competes to a certain extent with Google worldwide. Microsoft owns it and was the second most popular search engine in the UK after Google in 2023.
However, although Microsoft managed to take the lead over Google when it launched the new Bing, which has its own creative search experience powered by GPT-4, the data shows that the company has yet to gain more market share than the 7.14% it has.
In addition to being relatively low, this percentage was acquired very slowly, as Bing needed at least eight years to increase its market share from 4.53% to 7.14%. However, Microsoft's search engine surpassed the 100 million daily active user milestone just weeks after the company launched its AI-powered Bing Chat feature.
Bing has been growing steadily over the past few years, but the new Bing Chat feature is helping Microsoft increase its usage among people who have never touched it.
With Google having over 1 billion daily active users, Microsoft's 100 million sets a new optimistic outlook as Bing seeks to gain more market share.
Why is Google so popular?
Google it! It's a familiar phrase we all use when urging someone to search for something online, making Google synonymous with online research. To this day, with Google having a market share of over 93%, people are asking: why is Google the best search engine?
Much of Google's popularity has come from creating complex algorithms that improve the search process for the user. Google has even stated that its algorithm changes hundreds of times a year, making its results more timely and accurate than any other search engine.
In addition, Google uses more than 200 ranking factors when determining which results to display to a user and in what order, ensuring that people get the information they need immediately rather than navigating through many different search page pages.
It is important for her not only to provide a large number of results but also to provide the most relevant information.
Although Google has successfully mastered many unique features to make its search engine the most popular, it has not forgotten the basics: speed, relevance and simplicity. As of 2023, Google processes an average of more than 100,000 search queries per second.
Additionally, according to tests conducted in 2022, Google Chrome is the fastest search browser in the world when returning results.
At the same time, Google crawls more web pages than any of its competitors, with its search index containing hundreds of billions of web pages and exceeding 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. So, to date, Google has managed to keep its website clear, concise and convenient for everyone.
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