The Most Popular Search Engines in Ireland

Google

Google has a 96.18% search market share in Ireland, which makes it undoubtedly the most popular search engine. Google also captures almost 95% of mobile traffic. The large traffic potential of this search engine makes Google a viable option for capturing both paid and organic traffic. The downside, however, is that just about everyone else is competing for the same traffic.

Google has also made changes to its algorithm in recent years with the introduction of featured snippets that are aimed at fulfilling the needs of users directly on the website, meaning that they don’t need to click on any links. Such features, along with Google’s popularity can make it particularly challenging to capture the desired web traffic.

Bing

Bing is the second largest search engine in Ireland with a 2.33% market share. While the search engine is significantly smaller in comparison to Google, it still has a respectable market share. It is owned and operated by Microsoft and traces its origins in the previous search engines Windows Live Search and MSN Search.

Just like Google, Bing also filters search results into different tabs such as news, maps, videos, and images. Unlike Google, however, Bing’s homepage features a stunning image and news stories. In July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo announced a deal whereby Bing would power Yahoo’s search engine, which is currently the third largest search engine in Ireland.

Yahoo!

Yahoo might not have the sleekest interface, but it’s still the third largest search engine in Ireland with a market share of 0.77%. Yahoo is powered by Bing as mentioned above, but the search engine results for any given phrase aren’t identical on both sites. Results vary even more for long-tail keywords and search results beyond the first page.

Users that make Yahoo.com the default homepage will enjoy access to news, sports, tech tips, entertainment, and much more. Furthermore, there’s also Yahoo Finance that provides access to cutting-edge financial information.

Yahoo Plus, on the other hand, gives users perks such as disposable email addresses, customised subscriptions, fantasy sport research tools, tech support, and much more. Also, some users generally prefer Yahoo’s blue interface better than Bing.

DuckDuckGo

Search engines usually track your activity and search history for the purpose of personalising your results and showing targeted ads. However, many users are often suspicious of such tracking and consider it a breach of privacy.

Users concerned about targeted ads or don’t want their search data stored have been moving away from the top 3 search engines in Ireland and now use DuckDuckGo, which is why the search engine currently commands a 0.45% market share in the country.

DuckDuckGo stands out from most other search engines since it does not track, collect, or store any information. Still, the search engine does serve ads to users, but your search history on DuckDuckGo won’t affect the ads that you see on other websites.

DuckDuckGo also has a clean interface and just a single search page, which makes it easier to navigate than other search engines. DuckDuckGo is slowly gaining steam in the market as users seek alternatives to the biggest search engines.

Ecosia

The vast majority of people have never heard of Ecosia, but the company behind it has quite a noble goal. Ecosia is known as “the search engine that plants trees” because for every search made with Ecosia, a tree is planted in vulnerable areas with the profit generated from searches. Ecosia has funded 170 million trees to date.

Ecosia is growing in terms of popularity, especially in Ireland where it has a 0.14% search engine market share. It’s worth noting, however, that just like Yahoo, it is powered by Bing.

Yandex

Yandex is a Russian search engine with a 0.09% search engine market share in Ireland. If you do business in Ireland and would like to reach the biggest audience possible, you should ensure that you also target this search engine.

One thing that’s unique about Yandex is its image search result algorithm that uses the combination of facial recognition and image recognition technology to bring up results that feature the same person, even if the background is completely different.

In contrast, Google’s image search tool just uses image recognition, using cues such as objects in the background to bring up results. Unfortunately, this makes it less effective when it comes to searching up people.

Yandex has numerous quality badges or indicators it can display alongside the search results. One of the most prominent ones is the site quality index (SQI) that indicates how useful a particular website is to users.

Similar to Google, Yandex takes into account whether or not a user’s query has local intent and subsequently displays regional-dependent results. To account for this, you will first have to go into Yandex’s webmaster tools and set a site region.

Yandex offers numerous other services besides browsing, which include Yandex disk, Mobile apps, Metrica (Analytics), Maps, Mail, Translate, and more. All these features are the reason why this search engine is enjoying massive popularity.