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Google is the world's most popular search engine, with a marketshare of 66.44 percent as of December, 2014.[15] Baiducomes in at second place.[15]
The world's most popular search engines are:[16]
| Search engine | Market share in December 2014 | |
|---|---|---|
| 66.44% | ||
| Baidu | 11.15% | |
| Bing | 10.29% | |
| Yahoo! | 9.31% | |
| AOL | 0.53% | |
| Ask | 0.21% | |
| Lycos | 0.01% | |
| Search engine | Market share in October 2014 | |
|---|---|---|
| 58.01% | ||
| Baidu | 29.06% | |
| Bing | 8.01% | |
| Yahoo! | 4.01% | |
| AOL | 0.21% | |
| Ask | 0.10% | |
| Excite | 0.00% | |
| Search engine | Market share in July 2014[15] | |
|---|---|---|
| 68.69% | ||
| Baidu | 17.17% | |
| Yahoo! | 6.74% | |
| Bing | 6.22% | |
| Excite | 0.22% | |
| Ask | 0.13% | |
| AOL | 0.13% | |
East Asia and Russia
East Asian countries and Russia constitute a few places where Google is not the most popular search engine.
Yandex commands a marketshare of 61.9 per cent in Russia, compared to Google's 28.3 percent.[17] In China, Baidu is the most popular search engine.[18] South Korea's homegrown search portal, Naver, is used for 70 per cent online searches in the country.[19] Yahoo! Japan and Yahoo! Taiwan are the most popular avenues for internet search in Japan and Taiwan, respectively.[20]
Search engine bias
Although search engines are programmed to rank websites based on some combination of their popularity and relevancy, empirical studies indicate various political, economic, and social biases in the information they provide.[21][22] These biases can be a direct result of economic and commercial processes (e.g., companies that advertise with a search engine can become also more popular in its organic search results), and political processes (e.g., the removal of search results to comply with local laws).[23] For example, Google will not surface certain Neo-Nazi websites in France and Germany, where Holocaust denial is illegal.
Biases can also be a result of social processes, as search engine algorithms are frequently designed to exclude non-normative viewpoints in favor of more "popular" results.[24] Indexing algorithms of major search engines skew towards coverage of U.S.-based sites, rather than websites from non-U.S. countries.[22]
Google Bombing is one example of an attempt to manipulate search results for political, social or commercial reasons.
Customized results and filter bubbles
Many search engines such as Google and Bing provide customized results based on the user's activity history. This leads to an effect that has been called a filter bubble. The term describes a phenomenon in which websites use algorithms to selectively guess what information a user would like to see, based on information about the user (such as location, past click behaviour and search history). As a result, websites tend to show only information that agrees with the user's past viewpoint, effectively isolating the user in a bubble that tends to exclude contrary information. Prime examples are Google's personalized search results and Facebook's personalized news stream. According to Eli Pariser, who coined the term, users get less exposure to conflicting viewpoints and are isolated intellectually in their own informational bubble. Pariser related an example in which one user searched Google for "BP" and got investment news about British Petroleum while another searcher got information about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that the two search results pages were "strikingly different".[25][26][27] The bubble effect may have negative implications for civic discourse, according to Pariser.[28]
Since this problem has been identified, competing search engines have emerged that seek to avoid this problem by not tracking or "bubbling" users.
Faith-based search engines
The global growth of the Internet and popularity of electronic contents in the Arab and Muslim World during the last decade has encouraged faith adherents, notably in the Middle East and Asian sub-continent, to "dream" of their own faith-based i.e. "Islamic" search engines or filtered search portals filters that would enable users to avoid accessing forbidden websites such as pornography and would only allow them to access sites that are compatible to the Islamic faith. Shortly before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Halalgoogling, which collects results from other search engines like Google and Bing, was introduced to the world in July 2013 to present the halal results to its users,[29] nearly two years after I’mHalal, another search engine initially (launched on September 2011) to serve Middle East Internet had to close its search service due to what its owner blamed on lack of funding.[30]
While lack of investment and slow pace in technologies in the Muslim World as the main consumers or targeted end users has hindered progress and thwarted success of serious Islamic search engine, the spectacular failure of heavily invested Muslim lifestyle web projects like Muxlim, which received millions of dollars from investors like Rite Internet Ventures, has - according to I’mHalal shutdown notice - made almost laughable the idea that the next Facebook or Google can only come from the Middle East if you support your bright youth.[31] Yet Muslim internet experts have been determining for years what is or is not allowed according to the "Law of Islam" and have been categorizing websites and such into being either "halal" or "haram". All the existing and past Islamic search engines are merely custom search indexed or monetized by web major search giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing with only certain filtering systems applied to ensure that their users can't access Haram sites, which include such sites as nudity, gay, gambling or anything that is deemed to be anti-Islamic.[32]
Another religiously-oriented search engine is Jewogle, which is the Jewish version of Google and yet another is SeekFind.org, which is a Christian website that includes filters preventing users from seeing anything on the internet that attacks or degrades their faith.
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