In March 2022, Baidu accounted for 84.27% of the domestic desktop search engine market share, and Baidu at that time was the absolute king in the domestic search market. In February 2023, according to Statcounter's statistics, Baidu's domestic share has fallen to 55.8%. From 84.27% to 55.8%, Baidu lost 28.5% of the market in a year.
Domestic desktop search proportion in February 2023
In May, Statcounter once again announced the market share ranking of domestic desktop search engines, and Baidu's market share as of April has fallen to 39.64%. From 55.8% in February to 39.64% in April, Baidu's domestic market share shrank by 16.16% in just two months. This rate of decline is not an exaggeration to describe it as plummeting.
Domestic desktop search proportion in April 2023
In addition to Baidu, other domestic search engines have not had a good time, with Sogou's share falling from 14.53% in February to 8.62% in April, nearly half in two months. 360's Haosou fell from 5.1% to 3.53%, a drop of 30%.
In sharp contrast to the sharp decline in the search market share of domestic manufacturers, the market share of search engines provided by foreign manufacturers has soared, of which Bing has increased from 14.57% to 18.59%, and Russian search engine Yandex has the first growth rate, from 2.75% in February 2023 to 21.81% in April, and the market share has increased by 19.06%, an increase of nearly 7 times in two months.
When you first saw this chart, were you a little confused like me, and your first instinct must be thinking, is this statistical result reliable, and will there be any tricks in it? What is the background of this Yandex from Russia, and why Chinese netizens suddenly like it.
I dare not jump to conclusions, but we may wish to learn more about the source of the data through data search. Using the Edge browser to analyze Yandex's visitor data, it was revealed that 20% of Yandex's visitors came from China.
If it were to be fake, Yandex could buy Statcounter, but could it buy rival Microsoft to help it do it? Apparently unlikely. This only shows that it is an indisputable fact that Chinese netizens have abandoned Baidu in favor of foreign search engines such as Yandex and Bing.
So, why is Baidu, which once dominated the domestic desktop search field, not fragrant now?
That's because foreign search engines, including Yandex and Bing, offer more features, a better user experience, and higher search quality.
First of all, Yandex, a search engine that has only recently been familiar to Chinese netizens, is called the "most powerful browser" used by many netizens. Yande has all the functions of Google Chrome, supports seamless synchronization of bookmarks, account passwords, and history across platforms, and the important thing is that it is friendly to domestic users and does not need to go over the wall. Yandex has its own extension store with more than 1,500 extensions. Moreover, on Android phones, you can freely use the computer's extension plug-in, which is considered by many netizens to be a unique technology.
And Bing search, because of its powerful AI function circle a wave of fans, although baidu also followed the launch of Wen Xin's words, but how to look at it is like an urgent patchwork function, not only by many netizens jokingly called "answer not asked" AI software, but also its first to charge the model, is considered by many to be cutting leeks!
Let's talk about user experience and search quality. In fact, user experience and search quality are strongly related, search quality is not friendly, there is no good user experience, without a good user experience, users will abandon.
The biggest problem with Baidu search is the proliferation of ads. Search for something in the search engine casually, most of the entries that pop up are not what the user wants, and the top few must be search-related advertising pushes. Using Yandex and Bing to search for the same content, not only the advertising push is significantly less, but also the content will be adjusted according to the user's preferences, recent hot spots, etc. In this way, as long as the user enters the search content, the content pushed by the search engine is often what the user needs. You don't need to find useful information in advertisements like baidu. Not to mention the waste of time, but also to spend energy to sort and screen.
Baidu searched for ads
It can be said that because the content searched by Baidu is useless, many domestic users leave Baidu.
If Baidu does not change the current strategy of relying on a large number of push ads, and insists on pushing useless content to users, the domestic desktop search engine market will really change.