At last count there were around 1.8 billion websites that existed and around 200 million of those were actively used. 1
Imagine having to manually type each and every address of all those when you were looking for funny cat videos. Some of us may actually remember the days of having to type in the URL exactly to find a website! Nowadays the sheer volume of websites online means you’d never get where you wanted to be if you had to go through and type in all those address in the hope they had what you were looking for.
Search Engines were developed to speed up the process of finding what you are looking for.
They are the little robot helper that sifts through all those possible websites and gives you what you are looking for in a handy list search results.
The most popular by far is Google, in fact when I first glanced at this data I thought the chart was broken!
The Google search engine accounts for 92.16% of all searches. Which is quite a margin over closest rival bing at 2.88%. Yahoo! is there too with 1.52% of the search. While the only other notable engine is DuckDuckGo with 0.61% of searches, a service that prides itself on not collecting and storing customer data.
REFERENCES
1. https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/
2. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share