Infographic: Search engine market shares

Graham - many thanks for helping out here with version control!

I've had a few questions 'off-list' regarding what this Google dominance might mean for Facebook and their aspirations to take on Google in the search arena, so I thought I'd post my responses here too.

As the infographic shows, Google is hugely dominant in most parts of the world and as such it will be difficult for anyone to de-throne them without game-changing. Facebook does represent a game-changer as it is at the forefront of socialising search. But that really isn't enough - it will take more than that to replace a business whose brand name is synonymous with 'search'. It is simply not inevitable that Google will fall to Facebook, regardless of the hype that you hear. It's complicated because the battle is happening and will happen on multiple fronts - local, mobile, TV, etc.

Add to this the increased pressure that Facebook will be under to become more open, i.e. to allow people to take their profiles, friends, conversations and media wherever they want, including to Google (Google TV on this basis is a great chess piece for Google if it succeeds), then it becomes clear that Facebook has its challenges too.

That said people shouldn't be drawn into the false belief that Google vs. Facebook is Search vs. Social, because it really isn't. Search and social can work, and do work incredibly well together in a marketers armoury and the average user doesn't have to choose one or assume any formal loyalty to one medium over another. The corporate battle needs to be viewed seperately from the marketing and communications relationhips between the two channels.

I think the most important thing to remember is that whilst Facebook and Google are increasingly at each others' throats, for the marketer they are channels that are often part of the same user journey and should be managed as such. It's all good! The battle is about how to build and deploy useful convergence between the two worlds, not about the relative strengths or weaknesses of one channel over the other. Both search and social are critical and both are part of the future of communications - the question is - In what configuration?

Hi Josh,

Regardless of what's powering each in the background, for the end user they remain two seperate brands, with their own URLs, and are indeed seperate companies, etc, so we felt we should keep them seperate for this infographic.

Furthermore, the switch over hasn't been implemented in all markets yet either.

AP