How to Coexist with Google in Search Market

Why do search engines not named Google still exist? This question has dogged the search industry. Chitika Insights has an answer for that.

For over a decade, Google has stood alone as the primary search engine across the web. In the meantime, its competitors Yahoo!, Bing, Ask.com and AOL have cultivated their own unique persona and demographics. Chitika Insights investigated the top search categories on each major search engine in order to identify differences between user-bases. To quantify these results, we analyzed a week’s worth of data, comprised of hundreds of millions of impressions across our network.

Breaking down the data yielded interesting results which separated the five major search engines into four distinct groups.
Bing and Ask.com share identical rankings of their most popular search categories, indicating that the two attract users with similar intent. Searches for Loans, Home Mortgages, and Credit cards were most frequently queried perhaps because users view the two search engines as substitutes.

Yahoo! was the only search engine where nine out of the top ten most searched for subjects were related to business. This is potentially influenced by the prominence of business related sites such as Yahoo! Finance within the Yahoo! network. On the other hand, AOL’s most frequently queried topics were focused on both Health and Personal finance. This could be because aol.com has less of an emphasis on search and more on general content.

Among these stands the mother of all search engines, Google, which does not lend itself to any particular camps. In terms of top query categories searched, the results are quite varied, from health to personal hygiene to travel and leisure. In short, for a wide variety of questions, Google is definitely the answer. Nevertheless, its competitors have managed to find their niche in the marketplace although never receiving the traffic volume to trouble Google’s position.

Jump into this discussion with your thoughts on a search industry, with one very dominant player and four smaller competitors? How have the likes of Ask.com and AOL managed to survive?