Which search is worth our time?

Mario decides to exclude Bing from our future search tests and results reports. He finds the service intrusive and arrogant. In his view, its high demands contrast with an approach that increasingly frustrates him and makes the service practically unusable for him. This is his personal experience and assessment.

The last check also cost time and patience. During a Bing query, Aik became stuck in a time-consuming loop and stopped responding even to an explicit stop command. Mario reports that all the work on that check eventually had to be deleted.

Google and IndexNow remain the regular parts of our approach. We will also check other search engines, such as Brave, Swisscows and Yandex, at irregular intervals. Bing remains excluded.

For context, we examine the worldwide distribution of search engine and browser usage.

What the usage figures show

For September 2026, the last complete month, Statcounter reports the following worldwide shares across all device categories:

Sources: Statcounter – search engines and Statcounter – browsers, accessed on 12 October 2026. Bing is included here to provide market context.

These figures measure usage within the Statcounter network: page views for browsers and referrals to tracked websites for search engines. They count neither individual people nor all search queries. The latest figures may still be revised. Methodology

Google is clearly ahead. Chrome also leads, but saying “everyone uses Chrome” would go too far.

How widely is Microsoft’s browser used on its own operating system?

The figures we found cannot answer that precisely. Worldwide, Edge accounts for 14.64 percent on desktop devices, including laptops, and Chrome for 65.09 percent. This statistic also covers other operating systems. Presenting 14.64 percent as the Windows share would therefore be incorrect. The specific Windows question remains open. Desktop browser shares

Mario’s own daily usage looks different: he estimates 80 percent for Safari and 10 percent each for Chrome and Brave. This describes his personal usage. Choosing a browser and choosing a search engine are two different decisions.

What Google now shows from our experiment

The check report carried over from the previous chat, dated 12 October, 07:21–07:27 CEST, records the following:

• The English sunflower page appears as a web result and with the matching photograph in image search.
• The other nine language versions of the photograph pages were not found in the result lists checked. Both gallery overview pages appear as web results.
• No results for the German or English video page were found in the web, image and video searches checked.
• Of the 56 pages with the new general OpenGraph graphic, twelve were visible as web results, without a larger image preview. Four appeared in image search with older motifs or images from page content.
• The German field note 020 still displayed the old card, og-de-v1.jpg.

For the sunflower photograph, the report identifies the 640-pixel file, while OpenGraph specifies the 1280-pixel version. The matching motif therefore does not yet establish an effect of OpenGraph.

These details come from the report carried over from the previous chat; the website searches were not repeated for this draft. This was not an individual check of all 56 URLs. Missing results do not establish that a page is not indexed.

Our decision

Google remains our regular place to observe visible search results. IndexNow remains our way to notify participating search engines of new and changed content. A successful submission, however, guarantees neither indexing nor reach. IndexNow FAQ

Additional checks on Brave, Swisscows, Yandex and other search engines will take place at irregular intervals. They can provide further insights without becoming a fixed testing programme.

Bing is removed as a separate item in our testing and reporting. Mario is setting a limit on the effort he wants to devote to this part of the experiment.