3.1.4 The search engine market shares per country

One of the most complete work I found on this topic after mine is the
« Global Search Report 2007 »15. What stroke me the most in all the countries
studied in this report as well as in all the report and research I made until now are the
search engines market configuration which looks like very often to this:

Illustration 6: Search engine market shares in
Czech Republic

It is very rare to find a country where there is a close competition among
search engines. Even if in the High Technology world things change from a day to
another you have often the following configuration where the first search engine
is leading the game by more than 30 points on its followers.
This is typical from the search engines market or you are adopted by a
population or you are not. This trend seems quite relevant in the
software industry, people seem to look for a standard used by all. This is the case for
the Operating System industry, the browser industry, the e-learning industry. The
explanation I found for the success of search engine within a population is the word
to mouth, this is how Google has been so successful isn 't it? How never heard
sentences such as « you just have to Google it » Google is even nowadays in
dictionaries as a verb16.
As a conclusion I would say that in the world of search engines you are first
or you are nothing.
I have to mention as well that the market has a lot of small local search
engines which are if original enough bought by the big ones or if not will disappear
quickly (some example are coming in the news every month). The only key of the
success on the short term seem to be advertisement but on the long run you need the
technology behind in order to compete.