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The statistics in this article sound like garbage to me.

Google used by 90% or the world?

~20% of the human population lives in countries where Google is blocked.

OTOH, Baidu is the #1 search engine in China, which has over 15% of the world’s population… but doesn’t reach 1%?

These stats are made measuring US-based traffic, rather than “worldwide” as they claim.



Yes the stats don't make sense. It appears to be an issue with StatsCounter.

The Search Engine wikipedia article [1] has a section on Russia and East Asia market share, which confirms that the roll up used for world wide counts is off, unless the number of people using the Internet is drastically different in some of the countries.

Russia

  * Yandex: 70.7%
  * Google: 23.3%
China:

  * Baidu: 59.3%
  * Other domestic engines: "smaller shares"
  * Bing: 13.6%
South Korea:

  * Naver: 59.8%
  * Google: 35.4%
Japan: * Google: 76.2% * Yahoo! Japan: 15.8%

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine#Market_share


Maybe it's the same logic that says you can lower the prices of things >100%


I guess they'd argue that the people in China don't count, because people in China don't get to choose Google. But yeah, the stats they use from "StatCounter" are clearly not representative for what the world uses.


Market share is based on factual consumption numbers however subsidized or regulated by a government not free will.

Choice/Free will is an arbitrary line in the sand, one could argue how much choice we have about consuming google search when it is "85-90"% monopolistic business with well documented anti-competitive practices.

Chinese consumers perhaps have more choice than we do, Baidu is only about 60% market share. They do get to choose, it more that Google is not one of the options available to them, it is not like if not Baidu then it is a Phone Book.


You can argue that people outside of China don't get to choose something other than Google. Sure, there are recent pushes with default search engine choices and similar initiatives, but there is a reason why Google is paying hundreds of millions of dollars to be the default search engine.


It’s reasonable to see a distinction between the great firewall and the default browser search engine


To be fair, Kagi won't be used in China either.


I have used it from China, actually. Not big enough to be blocked.


Google is only blocked in places where it would already be hard for a company with morals to work in, if not outright blocked as well. This probably represents traffic globally, excluding those places.

Instead of downvoting blindly, please state which countries are currently blocking Google that would willingly allow Kagi, a AI/Privacy focused search engine company to exist in their domain? The results may surprise you!


Google is not blocked in the USA.


Interesting. I'm in the US and use Kagi everyday.


I read it more as "company having morals". Not many US companies have "morals".


Google doesn't, Kagi seems to (hopefully). I meant this more as a jab at countries willing to block Google, as they're generally dictatorships / authoritarian in nature. Oh the irony, as an american saying this in 2026....


They do, but do they align with your own?

It’s difficult, because Kagi results are so good and the alternatives are often business that behave worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42349797


I've heard Yandex results are good, and they often avoid Google bias. I have no moral problem with Kagi integrating results from Yandex and Google.


The yandex thing seems to be an argument made in bad faith at this point.


So you use Google. Kagi still rely on Googles index.


Google and Facebook would be very happy to operate in China, but they're too closely tied to the US intelligence apparatus to agree to the terms that China requires.


For years Facebook wanted to get into Chinese market, so much that Zuckerberg asked Xi Jinping to name his child: https://www.the-independent.com/news/people/china-s-presiden...

No I didn't make this up.

And there was reporting like this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/zuckerberg-s-meta-was-w...

Although a few years they seemed to completely abandon the effort and started to criticize China, although I can't find the article.

You'll be amazed at how quickly Zuckerberg "adapts" to things. Which is why I never trust a single word that comes out of his mouth.


there is no where in the article where they mention this (not even an * saying what they exclude).

they present numbers and say "world" like whole countries and groups of people don't matter. very arrogant.




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