Since the creation of the world’s very first search engine in 1990, their rise to prominence and use in our everyday lives has been something nothing short of incredible. Search engines and companies rely heavily on website localization solutions to increase the accessibility of diverse users around the world. With internetlivestats reporting that Google alone processes, on average, over 40,000 search queries per second, it is clear that an almost unfathomable amount of people use Google in their daily lives across the globe. But it isn’t the only major player in the field. In a lot of Eastern countries and Russia, Google faces tough competition to rule the internet roost and engines such as Yandex and Baidu offer a tempting alternative for internet users. Not familiar with them? Well fear not, here we will give you insight into 2 of the biggest search engines around today.
Despite not being very well known outside of Russia, Yandex is now the 4th largest search provider worldwide and controls over 61% of searches in Russia and other Russian speaking countries such as Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. The large advantage Yandex has over Google is its in-depth understanding of Russian inflection and grammar, which provides Russian speakers with a far more accurate search in their native language than Google could ever offer. The service does also provide its own services to rival Google’s, such as maps, translation, and cloud storage, and its support for Russian language Search Engine Optimization (SEO) far exceeds that of the American giant. At the time of writing, Google.ru (Google’s Russia platform) controls just 28% of the Russian SEO market, making Yandex optimization a priority for any businesses looking to expand their online presence to the world’s largest country.
What Yandex is to Russia, Baidu is to China. Boasting a very impressive array of different services including a Wiki, a file sharing system, and even its own social media platform, Baidu is becoming increasingly popular among Chinese net users. It currently controls over 80% of China’s search market and has over 70 million daily active users on mobile. While it may be behind Google in terms of its AI technology, it is certainly not a platform to be ignored – especially when targeting expansion or growth in the ever-lucrative Chinese market. Naturally, Baidu has a much greater comprehension of Chinese characters and grammar than Google, and thus is optimizes Chinese content more effectively than Google does. Due to internet regulations differing from country to country, when optimizing content for Baidu, users are advised to use experts to localize content.
While Google is still considered the champion when it comes to search engines, it is worth noting that there are hundreds of millions of searches that run through other platforms such as those mentioned above, and they shouldn’t be disregarded when it comes to building a global presence online and translating web content. An understanding of language and culture, in combination with high quality website translation, has had an undeniable hand in search engines’ successes around the world. In order for any of these major players to become the unrivaled world’s search engine, they will need to invest in international markets.
Meanwhile, for companies who are expanding into markets with other top search engines, it’s worth investing in a localization partner who can help ensure that all of your content is up-to-speed with the SEO rules of your target market. To increase the accessibility and readability of your website for diverse users around the world, CSOFT offers high quality website localization solutions. Learn more here.
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