I’m usually a fan of the underdog. Chris Daughtry was one (he didn’t WIN American Idol, or really come that close, but look at him now). And what about poor Tom (the cat) of the Tom and Jerry duo? Of course, one of the most famous underdogs was David, who beat the giant Goliath with his slingshot. And anyone who knows me even a little bit knows I am a die-hard Apple fan. But here’s one case where I am not: search engines.
I did use AltaVista for a long time after many others came on the scene. I guess I felt a bit loyal to the first major search engine. But after Google went big-time, I abandoned the AV ship for good.
Over the past decade, many search engines have come (and gone). Remember Excite? OK, it still exists, but no one really uses it (sorry if any Excite lovers are reading this). But only one has dug in its heals and garnered 84.5% of the market share.
Sometimes clients ask about the benefits of advertising on any other search engine, and I usually say this: what benefits? When one company has 84.5% of the search engine market share, you can usually get a pretty good return on your investment by putting your money in that “basket.”
Yes, I realize that I’m telling you to ignore 15.5% of the market. It might be harder to ignore that portion if there was one other search engine with a larger percentage. But, given that the 15.5% is broken up into several other smaller portions, it just doesn’t make sense to focus energies there… at least not until you’ve “wrapped up” the 84.5% portion.
I’m certainly still rooting for a few of the underdogs (such as Bing), just not putting my money with them… yet.
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