This post was written back in 2013 to indicate search engine market shares in key markets in the world like the US, UK, China, Canada, France, Belgium, Singapore, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore etc.
The data source used were mainly: Hitwise, comScore, Techinasia and a few other reputable sources at that time.
If you are interested in further updates on search engine market share around the world, take a look at my posts in 2019 or 2020.
1. Search Engine market share in China
From TechinAsia post and taken data from CNZZ via MarBridge Daily, Baidu still leads the market with nearly 71% share of pageview, followed by Qihoo’s So.com with 12.3%
Google declined nearly 1% from 5% at Dec 2012 to 4.25% at Feb 2013. Detailed information could be found in the table below:
| Search Engine | Share by Pageview (Oct 2012) | Share by Pageview (Dec 2012) | Share by Pageview (Feb 2013) |
| Baidu | 72.97% | 71.76% | 70.49% |
| Qihoo So.com | 9.64% | 10.39% | 12.36% |
| Sogou | 7.83% | 7.92% | 7.85% |
| 4.72% | 5.07% | 4.25% | |
| Tencent Soso.com | 3.68% | 3.73% | 3.92% |
| Bing | 0.52% | 0.52% | 0.52% |
| Youdao | 0.31% | 0.31% | 0.26% |
| Yahoo | 0.25% | 0.26% | 0.28% |
| Zhongsou | 0.03% | 0.03% | – |
| Qihoo.com | 0.01% | 0.01% | – |
| others | 0.03% | 0.01% | 0.07% |
2. Search Engine market share in the US
According to comScore PR release in Jan 2013, and May 2011, Google market share is still around 65-66%, Yahoo share dropped from around 16% to 12% and stays there. Microsoft gained around 2% during the past 2 years.
| Search Engine | Apr 2011 | May 2011 | Nov 2012 | Dec 2012 |
| Google sites | 65.40% | 65.50% | 67.00% | 66.70% |
| Yahoo! sites | 15.90% | 15.90% | 12.10% | 12.20% |
| Microsoft sites | 14.10% | 14.10% | 16.20% | 16.30% |
| Ask Network | 3.00% | 2.90% | 3.00% | 3.00% |
| AOL | 1.50% | 1.50% | 1.70% | 1.80% |
3. Search Engine Market Share in the UK
From Hitwise data center in the UK, Google sites still maintains 90%+ market share, followed by Bing and Yahoo. So there is literally no change during the past 2 years from market share point of view.
4. Search Engine market share in Canada
The data is not based on the volume of searches, but based on visits share.
The data source is again from Hitwise Canada
5. Search Engine Market Share in France
Google continues to maintain a leading position with 94% of the market share according to comScore 2013 France Digital Future in Focus.
Bing and Yahoo, each has about 2% of the market share, followed by Ask and Organe.
6. Search Engine Market share in Belgium
2012 Belgium Digital future in Focus report from comScore stated that Google has 93.6% of the market share, followed by Microsoft and Yahoo with 1.2% each. eBay contributes 0.8% and others have 3.1%
7. Search Engine Market Share in Hong Kong
Again data was taken from Hitwise Hong Kong, public data center
If we compare this and the same data in Mar 2011, we could see some clear changes
| Search Engine | Mar 2011 | Dec 2012 | % change |
| Google Hong Kong | 35.90% | 27.47% | -8.43% |
| Yahoo! Hong Kong Search | 25.42% | 18.51% | -6.91% |
| 16.89% | 29.63% | +12.74% | |
| Baidu | 4.28% | 4.61% | +0.33% |
| Google Taiwan | 3.59% | no data | |
| Bing | no data | 4.39% |
It is surprising to see that people in Hong Kong shifted from using Google Hong Kong to Google.com. Could it be because the default search engine on chrome & Firefox omni bars is google.com not google.com.hk? I don’t have answer to this question so if anyone from Hong Kong could share some insights, it’s much appreciated.
Yahoo sees such a huge drop after 2 years, it lost about 7% market share. Bing took the 5th place from Google Taiwan, which is not surprising given Bing & Yahoo Global alliance.
8. Search Engine market share in Singapore
The market share hasn’t changed much in Singapore over the last 2 years. It seems that the market reached its equilibrium point. Google leads with 87.2%, followed by Yahoo 8.98%, Bing 1.57% for 24 weeks ending Jun 2012.
Google had 86.51% share in Jul 2011, followed by Yahoo 10.17%, Bing 1.74%
9. Search Engine Market Share in Brazil
Using similar report from comScore, 2013 Brazil Digital Future in Focus, we could find out that Brazilian searched 142 times on average during Dec 2012. As for search engine market share, they not only use Google but many other sites to search. In the table below, it shows that there are closed to 20M Brazilian who use Facebook to search.
From a search query volume point of view, Google still maintains a lion share of 91.77%, followed by MercadoLibre with only 2.68%. Nothing much changed since 2 years ago regarding Google’s market share.
| Properties | Unique Searches (in thousand) | Searches per searcher | % Share |
| Google sites | 43802 | 130 | 91.77% |
| 19267 | 4.6 | 1.43% | |
| MercadoLibre | 14095 | 11.8 | 2.68% |
| Terra – Telefonica | 13523 | 4.4 | 0.96% |
| Ask Network | 11167 | 4.4 | 0.79% |
| Microsoft sites | 8521 | 8.6 | 1.18% |
| UOL | 5791 | 3.3 | 0.31% |
| Buscape Company | 5294 | 3 | 0.26% |
| Yahoo! Sites | 4811 | 5.9 | 0.46% |
| lGobo | 3803 | 2.8 | 0.17% |
10. Search Engine Market share in Mexico
Last year August, comScore published a report on the Future of Digital for Mexico, in that report one could find out the market share below:
- Google: 90.5%
- MercadoLibre: 2.1%
- Microsoft sites: 1.8%
- Yahoo! sites: 1.7%
- Others: 3.9%
11. Search Engine Market Share in Russia
comScore graph stopped at May 2011 with 64% market share for Yandex, 29% for Google and about 7% for the rest.
Lastly, could you guess which region/country had the highest number of searches per searcher in 2012?
Well it was Latin America with an average of 162 searches per searcher, about 40% higher than the worldwide average. And The winning country is Turkey with 217 searches per searcher!
Feel free to drop any comments you may have.
Thanks,
Chandler
Very useful! Thanks for this. I especially appreciate you linking to the sources.
Those statistics are really interesting, thanks! Is there any report that states about the current global market shares? I’ve been searching for that, but surprisingly, I couldn’t find any reliable sources with clear figures.
Hi Gemini, You can try this link http://searchengineland.com/google-worlds-most-popular-search-engine-148089
comScore and Danny Sullivan are both reliable sources of data. I would trust Danny Sullivan more actually 😀
Thanks! I just wish I could find the official report of comScore, because I’m doing a school work right now, and teachers… well, they do value more papers and reports than a mere webpage as sources… Thanks anyway!
You could try to ask your professors about Danny Sullivan, Editor of Search Engine Land. If he/she is serious about search engine in general, he/she would probably know him. He is one of the very few authoritative figures on this subject.
This are really impressive data, Can you help me with Search Engine Market Share for India as well ?