On the Web, search is king. Even though a new Google Consumer Survey found that only 1 in 5 Americans knows what SEO is, just about everybody in the Web content industry not only knows about search engine optimization, but also formats and titles content in an effort to get noticed by Google’s complex algorithms.

You can be white hat, black hat, or some shade of grey in the search world, but no matter your strategy, you know that there are a lot of page views (and consequently digital clout, ad revenue, and/or product sales) riding on your making it to the top of the search results pile. Google, of course, is king of the mountain, while Microsoft’s Bing recently surpassed Yahoo as the distant second place holder.

Here’s an infographic from Statista that describes the search market in the United States. Search results handled by the five major search engines are up 68% since January 2008, to some 17 billion monthly queries today.

[Statista; Image Source: ThinkStock]