While Google dominates the top slot in search both in the U.S. and worldwide, with a global search market share of 62 percent, there is still a lot of elbowing going on below, especially when you look beyond the U.S.
In a comScore ranking of the top-10 global search engines as measured by number of searches during the month of December, 2007, Yahoo comes in at a distant No. 2 with only 13 percent of global share. (Although, in the U.S., Yahoo actually gained a half-point of share in December, whereas Google dipped 0.2 percent). 
The big surprise, though, is the strength of local search engines in countries that don’t use the Roman alphabet. No. 3 on the list is not Microsoft, but Chinese search engine Baidu (with 5 percent share, versus Microsoft’s 3 percent). No. 5 is Korea’s NHN Corporation, which operates the Naver portal and search engine. Creeping up on Ask’s No. 8 spot, is Russian search engine Yandex. And Alibaba (which may include Yahoo China) brings up the rear at No. 10.
Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? These market share figures suggest that culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google.
Baidu, more to do with brand recognition effect.. lesser to do with technology and/or better search results (if indeed better)…
nice find erick - when i wrote about the changes with ms/yahoo/google earlier this week, I didn’t see the global engine data — after meeing with Yandex a week ago, I believe that others can prosper in their own country or countries.
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....ine-report
Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language?
Yandex.ru delivers better results for search in Russian than Google.ru
yes the best search engine no matter the language will win. But as such no search engine has truely catered for the global digital village.
Heck the current crops of search engines are stuggling with their predominant languages let alot trying to tackle others. Look at google , they spend all that money and time trying to deliver great results in english yet their results are full of spam , crap and its getting worse everyday.
If a local language engine delivers for its national audience then good for them.
Yandex should be ranked higher. See my blog post.
Imagine Yandex and Baidu went secret mega billion dollar merger. Damn, the russians & chinese would get super rich. That is super trading power.
They would share technology search engine secrets.
Microsoft live can’t beat Yandex. Believe me the russians are good at search engine. I’ve test that search. It’s way better than Google.
I think Yandex beats both Yahoo and Google when it comes to quality of search in Russian because of the specifics of Russian language
“culture and marketing play a big role as well—unless, of course, you are Google”
Why? Baidu and Yandex clearly beat Google in their home countries, so obviously these things matter for Google too.
I couldn’t believe it. It’s “Sputnik 1″ search engine.
Yandex have most amazing search results. If you type apple computer. Bam.
http://www.yandex.ru/yandsearc.....e+computer
BTW, Yandex is copying Yahoo and Google in everything else but search. They lunch copy-cat projects in .ru zone one after another. You can almost use them as a test to see what’s best out of Google’s and Yahoo’s projects. I think that if either Google or Yahoo want to get a bite out of Russian online advertising market they have to partner with Yandex, mail.ru or pochta.ru, Otherwise they will be left out of that sweet cash pie.
For this reason I make many web pages in foreign languages! The global Market is a big market to capitalize on
I find these global stats to be somewhat misleading. Yes- the stats are measured by searches but these are #s taken from one very populous country- China. That’s just 1 country and shouldn’t be represented as the whole world. Anything you build in China will have more views and more clicks because they’re simply more people there!
Erick:
“Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language?”
Search technology is *very* closely tied to the language/linguistics. While Google does a good job with English and some other languages, it doesn’t handle all languages well. Each language requires a different treatment. English lends itself to easy stemming, for example, while with CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) stemming makes no sense.
With English “Did you mean?” spelling correction makes sense, but much less so with Chinese or Japanese.
And so on.
Thus, saying “Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language?” doesn’t really make sense, technically.
Erick，Baidu is a great produce and very good at local language（all non-roma alphabet）。great capacity for liquormagnanimity Chinese information.
@Erick
“Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language?”
The major part of search technology that is independent of language is the weightage given to links. Other than that, many of the linguistic features of search vary significantly from language to language.
If search technology were to just limit themselves to interpreting words as a random stream of bytes - then your comment might have held strength but if it were to go any further beyond that language would play a much much major role as Otis has already explained.
I am a big time Yahoo! fan….although Google is quicker…somehow I like Yahoo much better. It clearly retrieves more results in a single search…may be their crawler is more powerful… Google is more of a hype. Although they do have some smart people inside, and their life seems to be very rossy now…they should just realize “not everyday is a Sunday”….Yahoo! rocks!
bookmarked @ http://livbit.com
Not really news. It kind of reflects your cultural ignorance really if you are surprised by such statistics and they are not far off from the last few months report. Probably just that folks who don’t use roman characters don’t visit TechCrunch or care about The Crunchies for example, yes there is a world outside of The Bay Area. Your rhetorical question “Shouldn’t the best search technology win no matter what the language? ” is a little stupid really.
Good for Baidu.Google and Yahoo must reign in US and other countries, not in China.
I guess Baidu success is based not only on their search capabilities, but on the Chinese government who banned the Google from use in China (there’s a TechCrunch post covering this situation). Also, Baidu use the Google’s UI design, including color scheme.
Not pretty fair play for Baidu. I think if Russian government could do so (close the access to the Google from Russia), Yandex could be far more closer to the top in the Search Engines rating. Happily, Russian government doesn’t understand anything regarding web, they’re too busy with oil I guess.
BTW, Yandex is excellent search engine, they also handle a lot of unique functions like considering morphology of words in search queries to produse smarter results. Also, they handle the Russian blogosphere, cleverly.
Personally, I prefer Google, but sometimes Yandex is just couldn’t be replaced even with Gogole (I live in Ukraine which shares a lot of web space and interests with Russia and other ex-USSR countries).
As a Chinese person had to Baidu in China’s development that amazed！
Yandex’s numbers does not look very reliable. They probably included all searches that was done by automated crawlers and content grabbers and there are a lot of them. Have a look at this article (in Russian): http://alexf.name/2008-01-28/k.....eoshnikov/ Second image produced by special tool of yandex, showing volume of requests. Number of requests for very rare but commercial query jumped from 600 to almost 200 000 in just 1 month. Fact that they showing this new numbers indicates that they does not filter automated bot requests.
Yandex is a very good engine, but Google.ru is slowly getting better and picking up market share.
Yandex white labels its search to Mail.ru, so maybe these figures are counted as well??
One thing to note is the Yandex design - undertaken by artlebedev, its a very functional and well thought out design.