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SEO Job Knowledge Interview Question #7: What Are the Most Important Engines?

most important search engines

As hard as it is to assess ANY job candidate’s knowledge, it’s even harder with SEO candidates because there’s so much gray area in the industry. This blog series presents questions you can pose to help you determine a candidate’s level of knowledge.

What are the most important search engines, and what makes them important?

Any mention of MSN (and even Yahoo) is ground for immediate disqualification. What you are looking for is how familiar the candidate is with the world of search outside of Google.

Here’s how I would answer:

Google is obviously the clear leader in search as it earns over 70% market share on desktop and a whopping 96+% on mobile (according to NetMarketshare). Bing, which also powers Yahoo search, hovers around 14% on desktop and a little over 3% on mobile.

But importance matters by virtue of what you are trying to accomplish. Google will deliver the most traffic, but Bing can often deliver more targeted traffic. And if you’re running paid ads, Bing can deliver traffic with a better profit margin than Google.

There are a couple of other engines that are trying to make headway, Duck Duck Go being one of them. This is one to keep an eye on. And if you are in Russia or China, Yandex and Baidu are important players, respectively.

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