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Search engines began as a novelty, and in just a few decades have become a major part of our everyday lives. Whether you need a search engine for work or school, almost everyone today uses a search engine for something, as we’ll see in our list of search engine statistics.
Written by Max Pitchkites (Writer)
Reviewed by Aleksander Hougen (Managing Editor)
Facts checked by Eugenie Tiu (Editorial Assistant)
Last Updated: 2024-01-29T16:34:46+00:00
All our content is written fully by humans; we do not publish AI writing. Learn more here.
Search engines have become more widely used over time, and they have created a major industry that shapes the way all other businesses operate. We’ve compiled a list of 22 search engine statistics to give you an idea about what the current trends in the search industry are like and where it might go in the future.
Search engines won’t go away anytime soon, but the way internet users are finding information online continues to change. Mobile devices have become the most common way to use search engines, Google remains dominant in spite of growing competition and search engine privacy is an increasing concern among Americans.
Stick with us as we dive into the most important search engine statistics of 2024.
Max Pitchkites (Writer)
Max served as a member of the Computer Security Incident Response Team at Indiana University, where he was a cybersecurity writer. He made the decision to go freelance in 2021 and now writes in the tech niche for a number of clients, including Privacy.net and VPNoverview. His background in cybersecurity writing and research led him to Cloudwards in August 2021, where he writes about security, VPNs and browsers. When not writing about technology, Max writes creatively in the fantasy genre and illustrates on a freelance basis.
Aleksander Hougen (Managing Editor)
Aleksander Hougen, the managing editor at Cloudwards, is a seasoned expert in cloud storage, digital security and VPNs, with an educational background in software engineering. Beyond his prolific writing commitment, Aleksander helps with managing the website, keeping it running smoothly at all times. Outside of the professional realm, he is a digital nomad with a passion for traveling, having lived in many countries across four continents.
Learn more about our editorial team and our research process.
Out of all of our findings, we thought these were the most noteworthy search engine statistics.
Based on all the statistics we’ve gathered, we deduced a few important facts about search engines themselves. The search engine industry is rapidly changing, so it will help to know a few current trends as you read the article.
First we’ll begin with information about the search engine market itself. Google is the dominant search engine for most of the world, but that can vary by region.
It’s no surprise that Google Search, the most widely used search engine of all time, owns the vast majority of the global search market. According to Statcounter, Google made up 91.94% of the global search market in December 2021, followed by Bing at 2.86% and Yahoo at 1.5%.1
Division of Global Search Market
However, Baidu is the top search engine in China, where it owns 85.48% of the search market share. In China, Google has a meager 2.93% market share. Bing owns more of the market share in China than Google with 4.44%. Meanwhile, the Baidu competitor Sogou was reported to own 3.66% of the search market.2
Division of Chinese Search Market
Google makes up 95% of the mobile search market in the United States, as of December 2021, according to Statcounter. The exact percentage may change slightly, but we don’t foresee Google coming down from its lofty position anytime soon.15
DuckDuckGo — a privacy-friendly search engine and the best Google alternative, celebrated its billionth search query on January 13, 2022. Even though no other search engine comes close to Google’s daily traffic or market share, other search engines are still growing.3
There’s no question Google is the most dominant search engine in the world. There are dozens of search engines on the web, but none of them come close to reaching anything like Google’s daily traffic loads.
To illustrate our point, Google processes an average of 40,000 search queries every second worldwide, or 3.5 billion searches daily and 1.2 trillion searches per year.4
Around 46% of all Google searches are searches for something local to the user.5
Google makes up 76% of all mobile search traffic worldwide and 86% of all search traffic for desktop. Note that Google gets more searches from mobile devices than desktop computers. We discuss mobile search statistics in greater detail below.5
Approximately 82% of traffic on the web analyzed by WhoTracks.Me contains third-party scripts owned by Google. Whether or not you’re using a Google product or service, Google code is still present on a large portion of the web.6
According to research by Ahrefs, 90.63% of web pages on the internet get no organic traffic at all from Google, and 5.29% receive fewer than 10 visits per month. This can happen when a web page’s content isn’t optimized for Google Search.
Backlinks play an important role in boosting a web page’s SEO score, but 66.31% of web pages don’t have any types of links, and 26.29% have fewer than three.7
Percentage of Websites That Receive Organic Google Traffic, Per Month
BrightEdge Research reports that 57% of all search traffic is mobile. Consumers are now more likely to use a smartphone or tablet to perform searches on the web, whereas 43% of searches are on desktop.
Around 51% of customers say that they usually discover new products on their mobile devices. Companies are able to attract a lot of customers by having mobile sites, as 69% of smartphone users have stated their preference for purchasing from mobile sites more often than desktop sites.8
There’s a wide divergence in search rankings between mobile and desktop SERPs, even if it’s the same query for the same search engine. A full 79% of all keywords, and 47% of keywords within the first 20 positions, are assigned different rankings on mobile and desktop SERPs.8
Organic search continues to be the main source of trackable website traffic. Organic search makes up 53.3% of all web traffic, while other channels, such as social media, trail behind.9
BrightEdge Research reports that technology and B2B companies make roughly twice the amount of money from organic search alone than from all other channels combined.9
Keyword research from Ahrefs shows that the vast majority of U.S. search queries have hardly been searched at all. Ahrefs states that 95% of search queries in the U.S. are searched fewer than 10 times per month, based on a sample of 3.8 billion keywords.16
Now that we’ve covered some of the ways search engines are used, let’s talk more about the users themselves.
Search results have a significant influence on the purchasing habits of their users. Google reports that 39% of purchasers made their buying choices as the result of a relevant search.10
Google reports that 27% of people around the world are using voice search to find information on mobile.11
A report from Moz shows that 77% of its respondents use Google three times or more per day. The frequency of Google searches is correlated with age, with 80% users between 13 and 21 years old using Google more than three times per day. Only 60% of users over 60 search with Google at least three times per day.12
Users are far more likely to click on organic search results than ads. About 47% of respondents to Moz’s report said that they “rarely or never click on ads,” and 25% said they clicked on the “organic results much more than the ads.”
Only 19% didn’t distinguish between ads and organic search results — these respondents clicked on whichever best answered the searcher’s question. About 4% clicked on ads more than organic search results, and 4% “rarely or never” clicked on organic search results.12
Likelihood of Clicking on Organic Results or Ads
The Pew Research Center surveyed a range of American citizens on issues related to online privacy. The results of the report show that the majority of Americans regard the privacy of their data as either “very important” or “somewhat important” while also feeling like there isn’t much they can do to control their data.
If you care about online privacy, check out our guide on tools to help ensure your privacy online.
A whopping 74% of respondents said “being in control of who can get info about you” is “very important” to them, while 19% regarded it as “somewhat important.” In total, 93% of Americans value having control over their data.”13
Americans’ Views on Controlling Their Data
The Pew study reports that 66% of respondents said they are not confident that records of their search activity collected by search engines will be private and secure.
Of those, 41% said they were “not at all confident” about the privacy and security of their search data, while 25% were “not too confident.” About 14% were “somewhat confident” about the confidentiality of their search data and only 2% were “very confident” about it.13
The “right to be forgotten” is a term that gained widespread attention after a privacy case between the European Court of Justice and Google in 2014. It refers to the right of European Union citizens to have their personal information removed from search engine results and databases under certain circumstances. Since then, issues of online privacy have reached a wider awareness.
The results of another survey from Pew Research suggest that the majority of Americans support the right to have some of their personal information removed from online searches.
Approximately 74% of surveyed Americans said it was important to “keep things about themselves from being searchable online,” whereas 23% thought it was more important to have the ability to “discover potentially useful information about others.”14
Percentage of Americans Who Support Right to Remove Personal Information
A full 85% of adults in the United States believe all Americans should have the right to have images and videos of them removed from public search results if the content is embarrassing, sensitive or otherwise incriminating.
About 67% believe Americans should have the right to be forgotten when employment history or work records are involved, and 56% say they should have the right to have negative media coverage about them removed from public search results.
Only 39% of respondents believe data collected by law enforcement, such as criminal records or mugshots, should fall under the right to be forgotten.14
These statistics should give you a snapshot of the current trends in the search engine industry and an idea for where it might go next. Google is obviously the top search engine, but its competitors are still managing to stay afloat — and some of them have recently reached new growth milestones.
The future of online search, and the internet in general, appears to be headed toward mobile. It’s not surprising to learn that 57% of search traffic comes from mobile devices when smartphones and tablets are more ubiquitous than ever. They’re less expensive than desktop computers and they’re far more portable and convenient to use.
Internet users are becoming more concerned about their online privacy and what search companies do with their data.
The “right to be forgotten” is an idea that’s reached widespread awareness since a major privacy case in 2014, and 66% of Americans today are not confident that search companies will keep their data private and secure. What will be done about protecting user privacy is another question altogether.
We hope you found our list of 22 search engine statistics useful. Search engines aren’t going away, but online search tools and the way we use them continue to evolve every day.
If you want to learn how other industries and sectors are evolving, we have similar posts such as cybersecurity statistics, online shopping statistics, online gaming statistics and data privacy statistics. For a little insight on how AI is progressing, check out our AI writing statistics.
What did you think were the most interesting statistics? Were there any search engine facts you thought were especially surprising? Let us know what you think in the comments below, and as always, thank you for reading.
The five most widely used search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex. Baidu is the most popular search engine in China and Yandex is the most popular in Russia.
Google is the most widely used search engine in most parts of the world.
The vast majority of people use Google, which made up 91.94% of the global search market in December 2021. Bing took second place, with 2.86% of the global market share, followed by Yahoo at 1.5%, Baidu at 1.37%, Yandex at 1.1% and DuckDuckGo at 0.67%.
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