Search engines have become an integral part of our daily lives, serving as the gateway to an overwhelming amount of information on the internet. While giants like Google dominate the global market, there are numerous search engines around the world catering to diverse linguistic, cultural, and regional needs. In this post, I will explore some of the prominent search engines from various corners of the globe.

Google

Market: Global

https://www.google.com
Undoubtedly the most popular and widely used search engine globally, with a market share of around 92%, Google processes billions of searches every day. Its algorithm is renowned for delivering highly relevant and accurate results, making it the go-to choice for users around the world. Google’s dominance is reflected in its vast suite of services, including Google Images, Google Maps, and Google News.

Baidu

Market: China

https://www.baidu.com/

Market share: 70%

In the vast landscape of China, Baidu is the search engine of choice. With a market share of over 70%, Baidu is deeply integrated into the Chinese digital ecosystem. Baidu not only provides search services but also offers a range of products like Baidu Maps, Baidu Tieba (an online community), and Baidu Baike (similar to Wikipedia).

Yandex

Market: Russia

https://yandex.com/
Yandex is the leading search engine in Russia and holds a significant presence in neighboring countries, it’s market share is around 60%. It has a unique advantage in understanding the complexities of the Russian language and provides services like Yandex Maps, Yandex Translate, and Yandex Music. Yandex’s search algorithm is tailored to the linguistic nuances of the Russian language, making it a preferred choice in the region.

Naver

Market: South Korea

https://www.naver.com/

South Korea boasts Naver as its dominant search engine, with around 70% market share it drives far more traffic than Google. Naver is known for its comprehensive approach, integrating search with various services like news, blogs, and a dedicated knowledge-sharing platform called Knowledge iN. It has a distinct focus on local content, providing South Korean users with a rich and personalised search experience.

Yahoo! Japan

Market: Japan

https://www.yahoo.co.jp/ (Please note site can not be viewed in the EU)

While Yahoo may have lost its prominence in many parts of the world, Yahoo! Japan remains a major player in the Japanese search market with around 20% market share. It offers a variety of services, including Yahoo! Japan Auctions, Yahoo! Japan Shopping, and Yahoo! Japan Finance, catering to the diverse needs of Japanese users.

DuckDuckGo

Market: Global

https://duckduckgo.com/

In an era where privacy concerns are paramount, DuckDuckGo has gained popularity for its commitment to user privacy. It doesn’t track user data or personalise search results based on past behaviour. Although it has a smaller market share compared to giants like Google, DuckDuckGo has carved a niche for itself among users who prioritise privacy.

The world of search engines is diverse, with each platform catering to the unique needs of its user base. From global giants like Google to regional leaders like Baidu and Yandex, these search engines play a crucial role in shaping the digital landscape around the world. As technology continues to evolve, the competition among search engines will likely intensify, providing users with more choices and pushing platforms to innovate and improve their services.

How could AI shape the search engine landscape

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already playing a significant role in shaping the search engine landscape, and its influence is likely to continue growing. Here are several ways in which AI could impact and shape the future of search engines:

Enhanced Search Algorithms:

AI can improve search algorithms by incorporating machine learning models. These models can analyze user behavior, preferences, and historical data to provide more personalized and relevant search results.

Natural Language Processing (NLP):

NLP enables search engines to better understand and interpret human language, making it easier for users to find information using natural language queries. Voice search is a notable application of NLP, allowing users to interact with search engines conversationally.

Context-Aware Search:

AI can help search engines understand the context of a user’s query, taking into account their location, search history, and preferences. This context-awareness can lead to more accurate and personalized search results.
Visual Search:

AI technologies, including computer vision, enable visual search capabilities. Users can search for information using images rather than text, and AI algorithms can identify and retrieve relevant content based on visual cues.

Personalisation:

AI allows search engines to personalise search results based on individual user behaviour, preferences, and demographics. This personalisation enhances the user experience by presenting content that is more likely to be relevant and interesting to each user.

Predictive Search:

AI can predict a user’s intent and provide search suggestions before the user finishes typing their query. This predictive search feature saves time and helps users find information more efficiently.

Ranking and Relevance:

AI algorithms can continuously learn and adapt to changing trends, ensuring that search engine results are ranked based on relevance to current user preferences and context. This helps maintain the quality of search results over time.

Semantic Search:

AI enables semantic search, allowing search engines to understand the meaning behind words and phrases. This goes beyond keyword matching and helps in delivering more accurate results by understanding the user’s intent.
User Engagement Analysis:

AI can analyze user engagement metrics to evaluate the quality of search results. This feedback loop helps search engines continuously refine their algorithms and improve the overall user experience.

Content Summarisation and Extraction:

AI can assist in summarising and extracting key information from lengthy documents or web pages, providing users with concise and relevant snippets directly in the search results.
Real-Time Updates:

AI can facilitate real-time updates and adjustments to search engine algorithms, allowing search engines to adapt quickly to changing circumstances, user behavior, and emerging trends.

As AI technologies continue to advance, their integration into search engines will likely lead to more sophisticated, efficient, and user-friendly search experiences, further shaping the landscape of online information retrieval.

Below is my list of top SEO tools to carry out a SEO website audit (otherwise known as a technical audit):

• Content related
• Website loading speed
• HTTPS related tools
• Hreflang tools
• Auditing Javascript websites

Content related audit

Test hotlink protection

www.htaccesstools.com/test-hotlink-protection/
This tool is to check if Hotlink protection is being used to prevent other sites from using and linking to your images, potentially costing a large amount in bandwidth costs.

Siteliner duplicate content finder

www.siteliner.com

The Siteliner tool is a free service to audit your website to identify duplicate content, broken links, etc.

Free plagiarism-checker

http://www.seotooltracker.com/free-plagiarism-checker

By copying and pasting a block of content into this tool, it will tell you if there are complete sentences that are not original, this tool will identify the original source or plagiarized content that was copied from the internet.

Pentest-tools – find-subdomains

https://pentest-tools.com/information-gathering/find-subdomains-of-domain?run

Tool to find sub-domains connected to the domain you need to do an audit. This can be useful for identifying duplicate content even if they are not indexed in the search engines.

BLOG POST Headline Analyzer

http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer

This free tool checks your blog post headline and offers feedback on how it can be improved. It checks your word balance by carrying out an analysis of the overall structure, grammar, and readability of your blog headline. It highlights your keywords in percentages by Common, Uncommon, Emotional and Power. The length analysis checks for the optimum character length and word count. Lastly, it shows your headline sentiment. Headlines that are neutral generally perform less that a strong positive or negative emotions.

Check grammer mistakes

Grammarly

www.grammarly.com/

ChangeDetection.com

https://www.changedetection.com/

A website monitoring tool to audit and track changes being made to content.

Reverso

www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/

UberSuggest

https://ubersuggest.io/

Generates a list of keywords downloadable in excel csv format. Also generates a pretty cool looking word cloud based on the list keywords.

Answerthepublic

answerthepublic.com

Check SEO related queries which users are searching for. It is a really great tool that is also free!,  which can help you with SEO and Content opportunities/strategies, the data is getting pulled from google suggest and related searches. You can then segment by the question prefix, e.g. how, what, why, when etc. More useful for finding content ideas and topics to write around.

Web developer checklist

http://webdevchecklist.com/

A checklist when building a web site including links to many tools. Also available as a Chrome browser extension.

Google Web developer checklist

https://web.dev/measure

An audit tool (at URL level) to learn how your site is performing based on modern web standards. It checks how safe your site is, how fast your page is, accessibility, SEO optimisation and other best practices.

Audit your website loading speed

Test my site (thinkwithgoogle.com)

https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/

Test a web site to see out it performs on a mobile and desktop device. There is a speed test score with recommendations on how to fix them.

PageSpeed Insights

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

PageSpeed Insights analyzes your web page to see how fast it loads in a Desktop PC or mobile device. It then generates suggestions to make that page faster.

Blisk.io

https://blisk.io/

Really good tool for device emulation if you are performing a page speed audit across devices.

Functions the same as Google Dev Tools emulation but is a lot faster for quick checks.

Varvy mobile tester

https://varvy.com/mobile/

Test the speed of your web page with a mobile device.

Googleweblight

http://googleweblight.com/i?u=https://www.chrisfaron.com/blog/

See your web page transcoded into a Web Light version by Google. You can preview it using a browser or using the Mobile emulator with Chrome.

Cdnplanet

https://www.cdnplanet.com/tools/cdnfinder/

Check the  names of all the Content delivery networks (CDNs) they are being utilized on either a specific URL or host name.

Bytecheck

http://bytecheck.com/

This tool also is for auditing your web page when in initially loads in the users browser. You can test out the time to receive the first byte to work out how fast your hosting is compared to other sites.

Recordit.co

http://www.recordit.co/

Program for Mac & windows to record your navigation across a site. Ideal for showing to clients where improvements could be made the the web sites UX.

Pageweight imgix
https://pageweight.imgix.com/

Checks your current image weight footprint and offers recommendations to optimize them better. It also offers a comparison bar chart of how your site compares to other ones.

Tinypng
https://tinypng.com/

TinyPNG is a free online tool that uses smart lossy compression to reduce the file size of your PNG images. It works by selectively decreasing the number of colours in the image uploaded to reduce the file size. The output effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in image file size.

Squoosh

https://squoosh.app/

Free online tool to compress and compare images with different codecs, ideal to reduce page speed without comprising quality.

Gift of speed cache checker
https://www.giftofspeed.com/cache-checker/

This free tool checks the caching settings on the server configuration and displays which files are cached by your visitor’s browser (and how) and which aren’t.

Websiteplanet Robots.txt checker

https://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/robots-txt/

Check the accuracy of your robots.txt for free. It gives you a report of errors and warnings. Some of the warnings I’m not sure about like “Sitemap support is not considered “Best Practice”, despite the fact that Google and Bing support it”

hilite.me
http://hilite.me/

Converts your HTML code snippets into pretty-printed HTML format, which is great when you need to show HTML snippets when creating your SEO audit. Just copy the source code to the left pane, select the language and the color scheme, and click “Highlight!”.

Robots.txt Test Tool
https://en.onpage.org/free-tools/robots-txt/
Test if your web content can be accessed by major search engine crawlers. You can change the user-agent to: Googlebot, Googlebot (Bilder), MSNBot, Yahoo Slurp, Lycos, Seekbot, Sistrix, SearchmetricsBot, BacklinkCrawler, SEOKicks and Xovi.

Matt kersley Responsive Web Design Testing Tool

http://mattkersley.com/responsive/

This free online tool has been built to help with testing your responsive websites to make sure the design is viewing ok in different screen sizes. You can enter your website’s URL into the address bar at the top of this page (not your browser’s address bar) to test a specific page.

Dirty Markup

http://www.dirtymarkup.com/

A web-based interface to tidy up your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.

Structured-data

Google structured data testing-tool

https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/

Check the validity of your structured data. You can either enter the live URL or enter your code snippet if it is still not live yet.

Linter structured-data audit tool

http://linter.structured-data.org/

Enter a URL in the text field to see what structured data your page contains and check the output is correct. Example structured data can be: Review ( RDFa MD ) People ( RDFa MD ) Event ( RDFa MD ) Recipe ( RDFa MD ) Product ( RDFa MD ).

SON-LD Schema Generator

https://hallanalysis.com/json-ld-generator/

With this free tool you can generate JSON-LD code for any page on your web site.

Schema.pythonanywhere

https://schema.pythonanywhere.com/

Online schema generator. Just choose the Schema type and fill out the fields to have a generated Schema in Microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD format.

Google SERP Preview Tool with rich snippets

http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561431-google-serp-snippet-preview.aspx

A SERP optimization tool to preview (replicate) how your listing will look in Google search results with the option to add Rich snippets & star rating.

Opengraphcheck

http://opengraphcheck.com/

Test online your Open Graph Tags for Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.  Get an overview of the valid implemented tags.

Facebook Developers debug tool

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

AMP Validator Web Tool

https://validator.ampproject.org/

Validate your AMP pages are marked up correcty and is also a web validator, similar to the structured data testing tool.

AMP Demo

g.co/ampdemo

Live demo where you can try searching for virtually anything to see how AMP pages can provide a faster searching and reading experience on the mobile web. To view the demo for Accelerated Mobile Pages in Google Search, you need to open the link above on a mobile device.

Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/

For presenting “word clouds” in your audit, this can really improve the visual impact of reports to clients.

Jeffrey’s Image Metadata Viewer

http://regex.info/exif.cgi

Shows the full meta data of an image (either online or uploaded). For each image this tool shows: File Size (in kb), File Type, File Type Extension, MIME Type, Animation, Bit Depth, Color Type, Compression, Deflate/Inflate
Filter, Image Size, Interlace, Pixels Per Unit X & Y and Pixel units. Extra functionality is enabled when you use Firefox or another Gecko-based browser.

HEAD resource

https://github.com/joshbuchea/HEAD

A collection of HTML head elements that are currently used by the major browsers. There is also a list of elements which are either deprecated or not supported anymore. The list includes the following elements: Meta, link elements, favicons, Social Facebook / Open Graph, Twitter cards, Google+ / Schema.org, Apple iOS, etc.

Server configuration

Reverse IP Domain checker

http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/

A reverse IP domain check takes a domain name or IP address pointing to a web server and searches for other web sites known to be hosted on that same web server. This tool is useful for seeing if there are any poor quality/spam sites be hosted on the same IP address.

Viewdns

http://viewdns.info/

Many SEO tools in one connected to the DNS of the domain you need to audit.

– IP History
– Reverse Whois Lookup
– DNS Propagation Checker
– Reverse NS Lookup

– Port Scanner
– Nameserver check
– IP Location Finder
– Check whether a site is accessible in Iran or China
– Get HTTP Headers
– Domain / IP Whois
– DNS & Reverse Record Lookup
– ASN Lookup
– Traceroute
– URL / String Decode

CIDR to IPv4 Conversion

CIDR is short for Classless Inter-Domain Routing, an IP addressing scheme that replaces the old system based on classes A, B, and C.

https://www.ipaddressguide.com/cidr

DNS Reverse Lookup in Excel

https://protocolsyntax.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/dns-reverse-lookup-in-excel/

Performing a reverse DNS lookup on an IP address (vital to verify that someone saying they are GoogleBot is actually GoogleBot.

Favicon checker

https://seositecheckup.com/tools/favicon-test

With Google now showing your websites favicon image in the mobile search results, it is important you check the presence and how your favicon appears to users. This free tool will show you the checks that passed, have warnings or failed ones.

HTTPS related tools

SSL server tester

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

SSLshopper ssl-checker

https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html

This free tool will diagnose problems with the web sites SSL certificate installation. You can verify the SSL certificate to make sure it is correctly installed, valid, trusted and does not contain errors.

Geocerts ssl_checker

https://www.geocerts.com/ssl_checker

This free SSL Checker will check for problems with your SSL certificate installation, if your certificate is correctly installed, valid, and whether or not it is supported by major web browsers.

SSL non secure content checker

https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/

Websecurity symantec ssl-checker

https://www.websecurity.symantec.com/support/ssl-checker

Check your website for Chrome distrust.

HTTP/2 Test

https://tools.keycdn.com/http2-test

Verify if your server or CDN supports HTTP/2.

Personal Blocklist and export sub-domains

Google plugin to block and export sub-domains. When looking for duplicate content, it’s often important to know how many sub-domains exist and are indexed by Google.

https://bit.ly/R0sx8T

XML Sitemap validator

https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/validate-xml-sitemap.html

Check your XML sitemap(s) conform the the standard outlined in http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

XML Sitemap generator

https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/xml-sitemap/

Free tool to generate an XML Sitemap with alternate (media and/or hreflang) tags based on an Excel (.csv) document template.

Hreflang tools

Hreflang tester tool

www.sistrix.com/hreflang-guide/hreflang-validator/

Tool from Sistrix to validate the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” link-attribute to make sure that Google can identify the correct geographical focus for your websites and show the correct language version or regional URL for your content. The Hreflang tester tool will check all the hreflang link-attribute markup for the multi-language content on your website.

SEO hreflang tag testing tool

https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/hreflang/

Validate hreflang tags on a single live page.

Hreflang tags generator tool (Aleyda Solis)

https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

Hreflang tags generator tool for generating or modifying hreflang tags.

Hreflangs.com

https://www.hreflangs.com/

Check your hreflang tags with different search engine user agents (currently; Googlebot, Bing-bot and Yandex).

DNS Dumpster

Tool to find hosts related to a domain. It can be really useful to see all the sub domains active and maybe advise on which ones could be removed or moved to the main domain. The results of the analysis can be seem in a visual graph or exported in Excel.

https://dnsdumpster.com/

Auditing JavaScript web sites

Bing mobile friendiness test tool.

https://www.bing.com/webmaster/tools/mobile-friendliness

This free tool from Bing will analyze your web page and tell you whether it is mobile friendly or not and also if it is rendering correctly.

Whatcms

https://whatcms.org/

WhatCMS.org can detect 142 different CMS applications and services that the site is using.

Seobook robots.txt analyzer

http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/analyzer/

Enter URL of your robots.txt or paste it’s contents in the box below it and the tool will test your robots.txt to see if you are blocking any content from being indexed in the search engines.

Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

See exactly what an HTTP request returns to your browser

Securityheaders.io

https://securityheaders.io/

Tool to check your server headers. It gives you a vote and tells you which headers are missing.

HTTP Field checker

https://redbot.org/

httpstatus.io

https://httpstatus.io/

Bulk check server status codes, ideal for checking chain redirects. You can customise the user-agent to be a browser or Google-bot for example.

Timer4web

http://www.timer4web.com/

This tool checks many aspects of the domain including: relationship with other sites (via the same IP address, Adsense publisher number and Analytics tag),
Connections IP & Reverse IP, Redirections, Reverse Google Analytics checker, Reverse Google Adsense check, Whois Content Frontend & Backend, Security Check Robots.txt, File Popularity, Social networks connected to domain and Google Page Rank.

Unsample Google Analytics Reports

A free tool that unsamples Google Analytics reports in seconds.

http://tools.beamusup.com/unsampler/

Disavowfiles

Free crowdsourced tool to find out if you have back-links that others have disavowed or find out if another site has your pages in their disavow file. You can submit your disavow files to help increase their database.

https://www.disavowfiles.com/

Xidelcgi

http://videlibri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xidelcgi

Free open source tool to help test XPath queries more visually than by crawling and testing through Screaming Frog.

You can also test using Chrome in the element panel, but the tool below helps by showing all results extracted, rather than just highlight them in yellow when they’re found/match.

Visualping

https://visualping.io/

Visualping is a free website checker for webpage change monitoring and website change detector. When the tool detects visual webpage (or even robots.txt) changes and send alerts via email or Slack team notification for competitive monitoring.

CodeSEO

https://codeseo.io/google-chrome-seo-without-a-plugin/

Cover many SEO tasks that can be handled via plain Google Chrome (Inspect element > Console). It covers the main Google search operators, Javascript console code, etc.

Sucuri

https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/www.chrisfaron.com

Check if a web site is blacklisted, contains malware or is trusted.

Talosintelligence Reputation_center

https://talosintelligence.com/reputation_center

Check the reputation of a web site, you can search by IP address, domain name, or network owner for real-time threat data.