The three major search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo all have a customer base so wide, you do not want to just stick with one. All are very different and when you add information to one search engine, it does not automatically help out a position on the other two. It is frustrating thinking of all the time and effort that goes into setting up a business online, but all 3 search engines offer different benefits to make them worth your time.
Bing
Powered by Microsoft, Bing launched in 2009, making it relatively new to the search game. However, they do have some experience as it existed as MSN Search back in 1998. Since then, it has evolved into a better and smarter search engine.
Before you decide to just skip down to the paragraph on Google, Bing has improved their search results a lot recently, taking about 18% of the market share in July. Bing works like Google in that the more people are pointing to an article or website, the more likely it is to be at the top of the results. Even just typing in information will bring up all sorts of resources such as IMDb, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.
Moreover, it is not at all difficult to get a ranking on Bing’s page. As long as you use focused keywords for your heading and content, generally, you are set to appear on the SERP. However, while this may be a great feature for new site owners and bloggers to gain visibility, users are not likely to be too happy with the search results. This is because Bing doesn’t care if the sites they are ranking on their SERP have high authority links or not, thereby compromising the relevancy of the result as well as making users question the authenticity of the site.
Recently, Google is an innovator in new technology with a driverless car, the Google-glasses and the Knowledge Graph that will answer questions, propose follow up questions, do comparisons and pull information from anything you are signed into. This is their biggest downfall, in that it has ALL of your information stored and where will that take us?
Furthermore, Google displays results on its SERP by assessing the authority of the sites. It determines authority of a site by taking into account other websites that are linking the site. Thus, when it comes to obtaining validated and trusted results, Google wouldn’t disappoint its users. Also, Google’s crawlers are expert when it comes to distinguishing between a valid link and an artificial link. Over the years, it has upgraded its algorithms, thereby turning its focus to valuable and quality content rather than promoting well established links and pages, like Yahoo does. Though this might be debatable but the general consensus is that Google gives start-up websites and blogs an opportunity to build their links naturally. As long as you deliver quality content which potential users may find highly relevant, Google will display your link on its SERP.
Yahoo
Having been launched in 1995, Yahoo! has been in the search game the longest, compared to Google and Bing. Though, during its early years Yahoo! used search results from other web crawler, it started its own indexing and crawling in 2003. While it may not seem so threatening, Yahoo! is Google’s biggest competitor in the search engine industry. Especially, since Yahoo! formed a partnership with Bing in 2009 (making its internet search powered by Bing), the combined forces of Yahoo! and Bing pose serious threat to Google.
Lately, Yahoo! has been making a lot of changes and upgrades to its search engine algorithms. When it comes to indexing websites, Yahoo! is quite good at it. However, it still tends to favor old and established web pages compared to new sites on its SERP. Also since Yahoo! has a lot of internal content on the website through its paid inclusion program, the search results it displays tends to be biased as it redirects searchers to its own content. This practice might compromise the relevancy of the results, which users find decidedly unacceptable.
Google, Yahoo and Bing, all are yearning to capture a greater market share which keeps them in the constant flux of making developments and improvements to their search engine so that they stay ahead of the game. For now, however, Google seems to be the most efficient and in-form search engine having aced almost all of the above mentioned criteria with flying colors. Nonetheless, if you are working on improving your website’s ranking, you need to concentrate on all and not one.