Most people, even Internet neophytes, have used, regularly use or have at least heard of Google. In fact, a lot of people only use Google, and are unaware of any other search engines. According to Internet Live Stats, where visitors can view how many Google searches take place on any given day in real time, the search engine king processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

However, despite Google’s dominance, there are a number of worthy competitors going after the search engine crown, including the following three:

No. 1: Bing. Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, and the second most popular search engine in the world, with more than 20 percent of the market. Bing is also the optimal search engine for Apple products. It powers Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s Siri, and is the default search engine on PCs. Small business owners should note that, according to ComScore, one in three people in the United States use Bing when searching for products, services and consumer queries online, which equals 33 percent of the market, or 6.2 billion searches per month.

No. 2: Yahoo! Search. Yahoo is the third-ranked search engine in the United States market, with approximately 300 million unique visitors a month. Yahoo indexes the Web and makes information from Web pages available to Web searches. Additionally, Yahoo! Search is powered by Bing, so optimization efforts benefit small business owners on both platforms.

No. 3: Ask. Ask, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, is the fourth-ranked search engine in America, with approximately 245 million unique monthly visitors. Ask enables users to perform a search in the form of a question to find relevant results. Over the past twenty years it has been the Q&A brand responsible for answering billions of user questions.

Blog by Dale Myers. the NALA's Head Writer.