Search engine popularity, ranking

Google is the world's most popular search engine, with a market share of 90.14 percent as of February, 2018.^[22]

The world's most popular search engines (with >2% market share) are:

Market share in June 2018[edit]

East Asia and Russia[edit]

In some East Asian countries and Russia, Google is not the most popular search engine.

In Russia, Yandex commands a marketshare of 61.9 percent, compared to Google's 28.3 percent.^[23] In China, Baidu is the most popular search engine.^[24] South Korea's homegrown search portal, Naver, is used for 70 percent of online searches in the country.^[25] Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Taiwan are the most popular avenues for internet search in Japan and Taiwan, respectively.^[26]

Europe[edit]

Most countries' markets in Western Europe are dominated by Google, except for Czech Republic, where Seznam is a strong competitor.^[27]

Search engine bias[edit]

Although search engines are programmed to rank websites based on some combination of their popularity and relevancy, empirical studies indicate various political, economic, and social biases in the information they provide^[28][29] and the underlying assumptions about the technology.^[30] These biases can be a direct result of economic and commercial processes (e.g., companies that advertise with a search engine can become also more popular in its organic search results), and political processes (e.g., the removal of search results to comply with local laws).^[31] For example, Google will not surface certain neo-Nazi websites in France and Germany, where Holocaust denial is illegal.

Biases can also be a result of social processes, as search engine algorithms are frequently designed to exclude non-normative viewpoints in favor of more "popular" results.^[32] Indexing algorithms of major search engines skew towards coverage of U.S.-based sites, rather than websites from non-U.S. countries.^[29]

Google Bombing is one example of an attempt to manipulate search results for political, social or commercial reasons.

Several scholars have studied the cultural changes triggered by search engines,^[33] and the representation of certain controversial topics in their results, such as terrorism in Ireland^[34] and conspiracy theories.^[35]

Customized results and filter bubbles[edit]

Many search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user's activity history. This leads to an effect that has been called a filter bubble. The term describes a phenomenon in which websites use algorithms to selectively guess what information a user would like to see, based on information about the user (such as location, past click behaviour and search history). As a result, websites tend to show only information that agrees with the user's past viewpoint. This puts the user in a state of intellectual isolation without contrary information. Prime examples are Google's personalized search results and Facebook's personalized news stream. According to Eli Pariser, who coined the term, users get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints and are isolated intellectually in their own informational bubble. Pariser related an example in which one user searched Google for "BP" and got investment news about British Petroleum while another searcher got information about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that the two search results pages were "strikingly different".^[36][37][38] The bubble effect may have negative implications for civic discourse, according to Pariser.^[39] Since this problem has been identified, competing search engines have emerged that seek to avoid this problem by not tracking or "bubbling" users, such as DuckDuckGo. Other scholars do not share Pariser's view, finding the evidence in support of his thesis unconvincing.^[40]

Christian, Islamic and Jewish search engines[edit]

The global growth of the Internet and electronic media in the Arab and Muslim World during the last decade has encouraged Islamic adherents in the Middle East and Asian sub-continent, to attempt their own search engines, their own filtered search portals that would enable users to perform safe searches. More than usual safe search filters, these Islamic web portals categorizing websites into being either "halal" or "haram", based on modern, expert, interpretation of the "Law of Islam". ImHalal came online in September 2011. Halalgoogling came online in July 2013. These use haram filters on the collections from Google and Bing (and others).^[41]

While lack of investment and slow pace in technologies in the Muslim World has hindered progress and thwarted success of an Islamic search engine, targeting as the main consumers Islamic adherents, projects like Muxlim, a Muslim lifestyle site, did receive millions of dollars from investors like Rite Internet Ventures, and it also faltered. Other religion-oriented search engines are Jewgle, the Jewish version of Google, and SeekFind.org, which is Christian. SeekFind filters sites that attack or degrade their faith.^[42]