Search Engines Around The World

Google, undoubtedly, is one of the most popular search engines in the entire world. From searching for hair salons near us to finding important data for our office assignments, Google has been there to help us out through thick and thin. But wait, not everything is Google! Other audiences your brand is interested in may be using other ways to search for you. Take a look at some of these alternative search engines.

1. Baidu

Baidu is China’s most popular search engine. According to reports by Statista, as of December 2021, Baidu had more than 85% of the market share in China. Just like Google, Baidu offers much more than just the ability to spurt out search results.

You have Baidu maps, Baidu Tieba (forum), Baidu Knows (similar to Yahoo answers), and other features like cloud storage and antivirus software. Baidu Doodles is also a creative feature that celebrates Chinese festivals or events.

As for Baidu SEO, it’s recommended to have your website hosted on a Chinese search engine server and the country code to .cn, with the website having simplified Chinese as a language option. Baidu’s ranking system prioritizes the homepage, so make sure you have a lot of links that are redirected to it.

In addition, the content has to be chosen very carefully. You need to make sure you don’t use words that are a part of the government’s blacklist. 

Their PPC platform is known as Tuiguang (百度推广) and is similar to AdWords. It allows you to perform keyword searches and create both search and display ads. However, this is only available for businesses having commercial addresses in China or other east Asian nations.

Since China has to deal with a lot of unauthentic products, applying for any advertisement account takes a long time. Baidu helps to verify all these accounts to provide truthful listings to their users.

2. Ecosia

Headquartered in Berlin, Ecosia is a unique search engine that’s eco-friendly. It is also known as “the search engine that plants trees”. This ecologic search engine is most popular in Europe and uses all of its profit to make a positive impact on climate change. At least 80% of their revenue goes into planting trees by taking initiative in over 130 countries. It takes approximately 45 searches on Ecosia to plant a tree.

Ecosia works closely with Bing and uses its web crawler. Therefore, to work on Ecosia’s SEO, you should follow Bing recommendations. It does not have any other features like Baidu other than its Chrome extension that makes Ecosia your default browser.

The advertisements are also served by Bing. So if you’re working with Microsoft Advertising, Ecosia can be considered in your SEM strategy. According to Boston Web Marketing, Ecosia shows more ads probably to drive up its revenues for planting trees, and its cost per click is usually lower.

3. Yandex

Another search engine that serves as an alternative to Google is Yandex, the #1 Russian search engine. It had over 60% of total user visits in 2021, according to Statista.

Like Google and Baidu, Yandex offers other features like Yandex. Maps and its voice assistant, known as Alice. Collaborating with Uber, it also has a ride service called Yandex.Taxi. 

Yandex SEO is similar to that of Google, with the result pages often showing the same sites. Moreover, if any of the search results here are unsatisfactory, there are buttons at the end of the page that will take you to Google or Bing. It also has algorithms to ban annoying pop-up ads or cloaking.

In comparison to Google, Yandex takes a little longer to discover pages. To get indexed more efficiently, submit your sitemap on Yandex’s webmaster. It also serves ads as a way for businesses to be a part of the Russian market. As a part of their SEM toolkit, it offers Wordstat, their keyword search tool.

4. DuckDuckGo

The first Google search result for DuckDuckGo reads “Privacy, Simplified”. This search engine was established to protect its users’ data. DuckDuckGo does not store your personal information or search history. It also does not track any of your online activities to serve ads. As of 2022, this engine has around 38 monthly searches and you can even check the website traffic at all times.

There are over 400 sources from which DuckDuckGo gets its search results, one of them being its bot called DuckDuckBot. But the most important source is Bing. Similar to Ecosia, you should follow Bing's recommendations.

As we mentioned earlier, this engine cannot store your personal data so it won’t track any of your locations, it can only make an approximation. This means that when you are researching for keywords, you should look into location keywords too. If, however, your search is related to a map, an Apple map will be shown. So make sure you’ve optimized for that as well. 

To advertise on DuckDuckGo, refer to Microsoft Advertising. For more information regarding this search engine, visit the DuckDuckGo blog.

Tracking SERP with Stillio

No matter which search engines other than Google you add to your strategy, it’s important to track your SEO progress. Each engine will have its analytical tool that you can check periodically, but it’s necessary to check the actual SERPs.

Using Stillio, you can automate SERP research process with full-length screenshots. You can automate screenshots for searches for certain keywords in over 150 countries, both in desktop and mobile format. This will not only be useful for your domain, but also for tracking competitors.

You can either save these screenshots directly or store them on your cloud. Check Stillio any time, and all your saved articles will be there. You can update daily, weekly, monthly, or even up to 5 minutes according to the plans. The pricing starts at $29 for daily screenshots of 5 websites in all locations or devices.

Conclusion

Your SEO strategy should not be contained in only one search engine. Try to learn about as many alternate search engines as possible. Sure, you should optimize for Google since it’s the most popular engine but remember to keep an eye out for other ones too.