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%

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

  * Naver: 59.8%
  * Google: 35.4%

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

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.

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

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!