Favorite search engine

It comes as no surprise that the majority voted Google as their favourite search engine – obviously, you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. But what was enlightening from the results of a poll I started a couple of months back is that Yahoo comes in second with double digits (at the time of writing, July 2010).

You can still vote for your favourite search engine because I haven’t closed poll – check it out below. And remember to leave your comments – this helps others in knowing why you prefer a particular service.

World’s favourite search engine, Google!

For many years now, the world’s favourite search engine has been Google and there are many reasons why it’s the ‘chosen one’- quick loading interface with minimal images unlike the “portal look” of others, really relevant results, ever improving algorithm (check out Matt Cutt’s video in which he mentions that about 400 changes are made each year) etc. Below is a graph of the global search engine usage from NetMarketShare – I picked up the top five search engines which are important to me (don’t care much about Baidu).

But from Bing usage stats, the dominance of Google seems to be under threat… though it’s going to take a long long time for another service to even come close. Based on the poll result and the numbers off this web site, I think that other search engines have started to nibble away at Google’s share. Good search engine marketers should build that into their plans.

Here are global search engine usage statistics from another well-known aggregator – StatCounter.

Favorite search engine – Time poll

Time Magazine, the famous and trusted source of news and information, conducted a poll for it’s U.S. readers asking them to vote for their favorite search engine. Surprisingly Bing’s 58% share is way ahead of Google’s 39% – click for details.

The search engine results pages

Google recently changed the look of their pages – both the search engine results page (SERP) as well as the query page. Maybe this was in response to Bing’s SERP layout which, in my opinion, is the best. I was really impressed with the job Microsoft had done on its search engine. But do I use Bing? No! So why do people stick to Google? Maybe it’s the best search engine after all.

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