Although Google dominates the search engine market, there are several other search engines out there that can still bring in tangible traffic to your website. In this section, we take a brief look at how Google compares to Bing, Baidu and Yandex.
It’s no secret that Google is the dominant force when it comes to search, and in this course, it’s Google that we will primarily be focusing on. But, there are several other search engines out there that can still bring in tangible traffic to your website.
Let’s take a look at how some of these other search engines operate and how they compare to Google.
Baidu
Baidu is a tech conglomerate dabbling in internet services and AI (artificial intelligence) and is effectively the Google of China.
Like Google, Baidu supports PPC, allows Geo-Targeting via it’s Baidu SEM and has followed Google in committing to mobile search by strengthening its foundation with search-powered AI.
In fact, Baidu reported having over a billion active mobile users as of Q1 2019 . When it comes to mobile search, Baidu converts non-mobile-friendly web pages into generated-mobile-friendly pages using transcoding to improve page load speed.
The Baidu SERP
When it comes to layout, Baidu isn’t much different to Google, but that’s where the similarities end.
Like Google, the Baidu SERPs feature:
- Organic results
- Articles
- Related search /people also searched for section/
- Related topics
Offering over 100 different types of rich snippets (including SERP features like Baidu Baike – its own version of Wikipedia), the contents of the results page couldn’t be more different.
Baidu’s own SERP features can occupy up to 70% of the real estate on the first page with varying lengths in size and levels of interactivity.
Below are three of the main kinds of rich snippets that can be found on Baidu
User Experience Rich Snippets – “Beijing weather” report rich snippet
Advertising Rich Snippets – A Product Listing Ad promoting Sunning’s “milk chocolate” in Baidu
Baidu-Owned Properties – A Baidu Baike (China’s Wikipedia) rich snippet for “chocolate”
Bing
Previously called Windows Live Search or MSN Search, Bing (which has also been powering Yahoo since 2010) is the search engine owned by Microsoft and, after Google, holds the second largest market share in the world of search.
Bing shares many core ranking signals with Google such as the value of link authority, but lacks Google’s sophistication when it comes to factors like semantic search.
For instance, Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines put an emphasis on simply using “targeted keywords whenever possible”, without over optimising a page.
Likewise, whilst Google’s been pushing mobile-first indexing, Bing’s focused on improving its visual search functionality using its Object Detection Model – meaning it’s become much better at understanding multimedia content like videos and images than Google.
The Bing SERP
The basic search results page for Bing both looks and feels the same as that of Google.
Video Search
Where Bing trumps Google, is with its video search results – which should come as no surprise as we’ve seen that Bing’s pretty great when it comes to visual search. Instead of providing a vertical list of videos (Google), Bing displays large thumbnails that allow you to click and play without leaving the search engine.
Snapshot Pane
Bing’s answer to Google’s Knowledge Graph, the Snapshot Pane offers direct information about the entities that a user searches for: from being able to listen to TED Talks and famous speeches to exploring scientific concepts and flights to your favourite destinations at a glance.
Yandex
Created by Ilya Segalovich and Arkady Volozh, Yandex is the search engine behemoth in Russia.
As has been the case with Baidu and Bing, Yandex also shares similar values for some core ranking signals such as mobile search. For example, from as early as November 2015, Yandex started labelling mobile-friendly pages in their index and went onto roll out their mobile-friendly algorithm Vladivostok in 2016.
One of the core differences in approach appears with how geo-targeting and local search is tackled. In Yandex, queries are divided in accordance with whether they are geo-dependent or geo-independent searches – this, in turn, has an impact in the search results.
The Yandex SERP
The basic search results page for Yandex both looks and feels the same as that of Google.
Geo-dependent Search
For geo-dependant search queries, Yandex displays different results depending on the location of the searcher – this means that search results will be completely different for people searching from different cities. This results in a larger emphasis on pushing local businesses.
For example, here is the search results page for the query “bakery”.
Geo-independent Search
When it comes to geo-independent search queries, Yandex adopts a basic search results page which all searches would see regardless of their location.
For example, here is the search results page for the query “chocolate cake recipe”.
