The Search Marketing Standard has a very interesting feature section in its fall issue. The topic is “international search markets” and five writers present the search engine scenes of five important markets: the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Russia and China.

The United Kingdom

In her presentation of the UK, Andrew Girdwood points out that Google is the dominating search engine as it is in the US and many other countries of the world.

According to Hitwise Google held 80 percent of the British search market in April 2007. The follows Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.

There are local alternatives, though. Girdwood mentions Mirago, a British based search engine with their own spiders and PPC program.

Italy

Simone Luciani points out that the Italian Internet audience is the ninth largest in the world.

Google is dominating this market as well, with some 53.5 percent according to Nielsen.

Number two is Alice Search, which is “enhanced with Google results” and uses Google AdWords for PPC advertising.

Number three is Microsoft, followed by Yahoo! and Arianna Libero Ricerca. Arianna is also Google based.

Germany

Tadeusz Szewczyk points out that according to (N)ONLINER Atlas 60 percent of the German population uses the Internet, which makes it a larger search market than the UK or South Korea.

Google has almost a 90 percent market share in Germany on its own. If you add the search sites that are powered by Google (AOL, T-Online and Web.de) Google has a reach of close to 95 percent. So if you want to optimize your site for the German market, Google is the one to target.

Russia

Alexey Iakovlev tells us that there were an estimated number of 26 million Internet users in Russia by the end of 2006.

This is one of the few countries not dominated by Google, but by a local search engine: Yandex. Yandex has some 49 percent of the Russian market.

Second in line is Google (22 percent). The company has established an office in Moscow in order to strengthen its position, and its share of the market is growing.

Number three is the Russian search engine Rambler (spelled with Latin letters!), followed by Search.Mail.ru. Microsoft and Yahoo! are close to invisible.

China

According to the China Network Information Center there were 137 million Internet users in China by the end of 2006. David Temple argues that China will soon replace the US as the world’s leader in the number of Internet users.

The local search engine Baidu controls 62 percent of the market, Google 20 percent. The remaining searches are divided between MSN, Yahoo!, SINA and others. Note that SINA seems to be powered by Google.

Baidu’s success is partly due to its lax regime when it comes to filtering out illegal MP3 files. The Chinese apparently loves to download “free” music.

Google is loosing market share in China, and Temple says that one possible reason is that Google has refrained from offering its email and blogging services at google.cn. Yahoo! once provided information to the Chinese authorities that led to a reporter going to jail. Google is apparently afraid that something similar might happen to them. (Although that hasn’t stopped Google from censoring search results in China).

In 2005 Yahoo! China was acquired by the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. In return Yahoo! purchased 40 percent of Alibaba. Temple does not say how large their market share is.

The most popular portal in China is SINA.com. SINA runs a community-based search engine called iAsk.com (which has nothing to do with Ask.com), but it has also a search form for Google.

The search and portal company Sohu.com also has a search engine site called Sogou.com Sogou is clearly inspired by Google. Just take a look at their logo.

The Search Engine Marketing Standard article is not available online, but you can go to the Search Engine Marketing Standard to order a copy. There is a short survey of international search engine statistics available at the site, though.

See also our article on the Search Marketing Standard: A magazine for search engine marketing