U.S. market share for search engines in January 2009, according to comScore. As you can see, Google is the dominant search engine on the Web in the United States.
In many European countries, the disparity is even greater. However, in some markets Google is not dominant. In China, for instance, Baidu is the leading search engine. The result is that in most world markets, a heavy focus on SEO is a smart strategy for Google.