In our live Continuing Legal Education seminars, we teach lawyers how to use the lesser known, advanced, and sometimes hidden features of search engines to conduct more effective investigative, background, and legal research on the Internet.

We use Google as a stand-in for "EverySearchEngine" (sort of like "Everyman") in these live MCLE seminars for two reasons. First, many of the features initially introduced by Google have been adopted by other major search engines. Second, because Google is the most popular search engine in the English language it is most likely that the attendees will be familiar with the look, feel, and navigation used in the examples we present. We do also point out some major differences between Google and Bing and Yahoo.

SearchEngineJournal has done a nice job of compiling statistics about the percentage of search traffic handled by Google versus its two most popular competitors. (It should be noted, that with Microsoft's 2009 investment in Yahoo, Yahoo's organic search results are delivered by Bing. The results of a Bing search and Yahoo search are the same. So, the individual market shares of Bing and Yahoo could be combined to show a 28.99% market share for the combination - still less than half of Google's market share.)

Source: Comparison of the Top Three Search Engines: Bing+Yahoo > Google? [INFOGRAPHIC]