Here’s another one of those posts that has nothing to do with London, cabs or travel, unashamedly it’s a vanity trip to find just how universal CabbieBlog really is.

Using search engines, easily the most useful invention on the planet (with the possible exception of the wheel, electricity, the English language, sanitation, democracy and Worcestershire sauce), and, would you know it, there are more search engines than you can shake a stick at?

We don’t all use Google, not by a long shot. So here are the top 10 search engines and their ability to find this humble corner of the Cyberverse which is CabbieBlog:

1. Google (78.23% of market share; ranks CabbieBlog at #1) Simple, clean, functional (and sends lots of visitors my way, thank you).
2. Bing (8.04%; #1) Why is Bill Gates’ search engine so popular? It can only be the devious and underhand tactic of incorporating it in 90% of the world’s web browsers. Please say you never use it.
3. Baidu (7.34%; #1) No I had never heard of them either, Baidu absolutely dominates the Chinese market with 74.73% against Google’s 2% share of Chinese searches. Rather strange keying CabbieBlog into a page covered in Chinese characters, but it worked, so at least I’m not censored.
4. Yahoo! (3.39%; #1) I’m old enough to remember when Yahoo! search used to be the go-to, with a huge list of directories and subdirectories. They’re still there if you look hard enough, but it’s now much quicker to search without them. It’s a bloody stupid name anyway.
5. Yandex (1.53%; #1) is Russia’s most popular search engine, once used in Ukraine, which I suspect now uses Google.
6. Ask (0.72%; #12) To be fair to Ask, CabbieBlog might be at number 12 in their search results but was mentioned on other people’s sites at numbers 2, 3 and 4. Once known as Ask Jeeves it’s now just Ask, but that’s presumably because a lot of internet users can’t spell ‘Jeeves’.
7. DuckDuckGo (0.39%; #1) Also CabbieBlog ranks 2-5, thanks, guys. This search engine doesn’t harvest or store your information, which means you’re not bombarded with adverts, unlike these days with Google’s advert algorithms are urging me to buy my own book.
8. Naver (0.13%; #1) Me neither, but apparently with a 75 per cent market share it’s ‘The Google of South Korea’.
9. AOL (0.06%; #1) Short for ‘America Online’, which goes back to 1985, this pioneer of dial-up internet is almost forgotten, get your grandad to explain life before digital.
10. Seznam (0.05%; #1) This Czechoslovakian search engine put me in the first 6 slots and even gave me an English translation. Thanks, guys.

I’m delighted to see that my blog is the number 1 result for “CabbieBlog” in every single one of the above search engines (except for Ask, but who these days uses them?).

Special mention to Ecosia which uses money from advertising to plant trees around the world to benefit the environment and local economies. Ecosia’s homepage keeps score of the number of trees planted, over 163 million at the time of writing, they also ranked CabbieBlog in the first 6 slots.

My favourite incidentally, is Ecosia, this search engine doesn’t store your searches permanently, use external tracking tools, or sell your data to advertisers. Your searches are encrypted and you can simply turn off all of Ecosia’s tracking if you want. What’s more, it’s transparent about how it spends its money, releasing regular financial reports. In October 2018, founder Christian Kroll gave some of his shares to the Purpose Foundation. As a result, Kroll and Ecosia co-owner Tim Schumacher forfeited their rights to take profits out of the company or sell Ecosia for a profit in the future – talk about putting your money where your mouth is.

These days of climate change becoming ever more frightening it seems planting trees using the Internet is the least you can do, I always search here before I turn to Google. Now, which search engine do you use?