14 DAY TRIAL // The search-engine market is as entrenched as it gets, and not for people’s lack of trying to change that. Google dominates, Yahoo and Bing follow with little hope of gaining on the Mountain View giant. This is largely because people ‘choose’ the search engine they’re familiar with it, not necessarily because it’s better or it brings something new over the competition. People have been using Google for years and it’s going to take a lot more than what Microsoft has been doing to change that.
This is also largely due to the fact that all major search engines today are ‘good.’ That is to say, they get the job done, very rarely do users feel like the search engine has failed them, even when they don’t find exactly what they were looking for or it takes more than a couple of different searches.
That said, there are times when you really can’t find what you are looking for and you think that maybe a different search engine would provide better results. Chitika, a search advertising network, has released an interesting study showing what search engines users choose when Google fails them. Most tech-savvy people would expect the second choice when it comes to search engines to be Bing, as Microsoft’s revamped search engine has proven to be a worthy competitor.
The study, which looked at data from over 39,000 people, found that not only was Bing not the second choice, but that it was not even the third. Almost half of the people that tried a second search engine for the same query chose Yahoo after, presumably, having found Google’s results unsatisfactory. Another 30 percent chose Ask.com, but only 16.4 percent opted for Bing.
This, despite the fact that Bing is several times larger than Ask and is gaining on Yahoo. The numbers would indicate that most searchers have a preferred service, be it Google, Yahoo, Bing, and that, when they rarely use another one, it’s not necessarily going to be a popular choice as a ‘main’ search engine for others. [via Search Engine Land]