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Comment by WhyNotHugo

17 hours ago

The statistics in this article sound like garbage to me.

Google used by 90% or the world?

~20% of the human population lives in countries where Google is blocked.

OTOH, Baidu is the #1 search engine in China, which has over 15% of the world’s population… but doesn’t reach 1%?

These stats are made measuring US-based traffic, rather than “worldwide” as they claim.

15 comments

WhyNotHugo

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weisnobody  16 hours ago

Yes the stats don't make sense. It appears to be an issue with StatsCounter.

The Search Engine wikipedia article [1] has a section on Russia and East Asia market share, which confirms that the roll up used for world wide counts is off, unless the number of people using the Internet is drastically different in some of the countries.

Russia

  * Yandex: 70.7%
  * Google: 23.3%

China:

  * Baidu: 59.3%
  * Other domestic engines: "smaller shares"
  * Bing: 13.6%

South Korea:

  * Naver: 59.8%
  * Google: 35.4%

Japan: * Google: 76.2% * Yahoo! Japan: 15.8%

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#Market_share

lolc  17 hours ago

I guess they'd argue that the people in China don't count, because people in China don't get to choose Google. But yeah, the stats they use from "StatCounter" are clearly not representative for what the world uses.

  • manquer  8 hours ago

    Market share is based on factual consumption numbers however subsidized or regulated by a government not free will.

    Choice/Free will is an arbitrary line in the sand, one could argue how much choice we have about consuming google search when it is "85-90"% monopolistic business with well documented anti-competitive practices.

    Chinese consumers perhaps have more choice than we do, Baidu is only about 60% market share. They do get to choose, it more that Google is not one of the options available to them, it is not like if not Baidu then it is a Phone Book.

  • elAhmo  16 hours ago

    You can argue that people outside of China don't get to choose something other than Google. Sure, there are recent pushes with default search engine choices and similar initiatives, but there is a reason why Google is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine.

    • tyre  8 hours ago

      It’s reasonable to see a distinction between the great firewall and the default browser search engine

0x1ch  17 hours ago

Google is only blocked in places where it would already be hard for a company with morals to work in, if not outright blocked as well. This probably represents traffic globally, excluding those places.

Instead of downvoting blindly, please state which countries are currently blocking Google that would willingly allow Kagi, a AI/Privacy focused search engine company to exist in their domain? The results may surprise you!