There’s no disputing who the king of search is from a shear volume standpoint. Google stands heads and shoulders above everyone else, and by a long ways. To illustrate the difference, or the dominant position that Google has in the search market, check out this graph from Alexa.com:
But there’s one area where Google is actually trailing behind both Yahoo and Bing, and that is search quality. In other words, how much traffic is sent to a website when a search query is made.
According to IBTimes.com, Experian Hitwise states that for July, Bing and Yahoo were actually better than Google when it comes “success rates”, or the percentage of searches that “resulted in a visit to a Website”. People using Google ended up on a website 67.56 percent of the time, while Bing scored over 80 percent and Yahoo topped them all at 81.36 percent.
It’s important to note that Yahoo.com recently (about 1 year ago), inked a deal with Microsoft to allow Bing to power the Yahoo search engine. So Yahoo.com no longer is, in and of themselves, in the search engine business. So the marketing, promotion, and quality of the search results that are growing for Bing.com are also having an impact on the Yahoo search engine.
At the end of the day however, and at least for the time being, the money is where the masses are and that’s on Google.com. Until Microsoft can build a stronger marketshare in the search space, Google will continue to dominate the landscape.