What is Wolfram|Alpha?

A new product from Mathematica, WolframAlpha is a new addition to the world of search, but is not in direct competition with Google, Bing, Yahoo or the other major engines, as it works in a very different way. Therefore, it should not be a factor in any SEO strategies at the moment.

Like Mathematica - an online computation system used for many scientific and engineering industries, it is a useful for highly technical questions.

For example, if you were to ask a normal search engine a question such as:
"uncle's uncle's brother's son" you would get SERPs that contain those words, whereas, WolframAlpha could compute this family tree relationship and return a blood relationship fraction - 3.125% for this example.

More information on 'Alpha':
- SERPs on Alpha will include a link to sources used for computations
- if a fact was disputed, Alpha would mention this in its footnotes
- it will feature advertisements in a sidebar
- toolbars will be released for FireFox and Internet Explorer
- it will display results from major search engines - Google, Bing, Yahoo! - and include links to any Wikipedia pages that are relevant.

Search Engine Market Share - US

What share of visitors are held by each of the major search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask?

At the start of 2009 the approximate search engine market share in the US was as follows:

Google - 72%
Yahoo! - 18%
MSN Live - 5.5%
Ask - 3.5%

You may note that the above account for around 99% of total searches. This is because several smaller search engines gain their results via partnerships with the four above. For example, AOL gain their SERPs via Google listings.

This page: Search Engine Market Share - US