Google's UK Market Share Falls Below 90 Percent

By Jane McEntegart
published

Microsoft and Yahoo! enjoy growth as Google falls.

Google might have expanded into many markets over the years but the company's core business is still search. The company's successful search engine is its bread and butter. However, it seems that the bread and butter is slipping in the UK. According to Hitwise, Google's UK search market share has dropped below 90 percent for the first time in years.

Experian Hitwise reports that in October, Google accounted for 89.33 percent of all UK internet searches. While this is definitely still the lion's share of the market, its the first time in five years that Google has dropped below 90 percent market share in the UK. The 1.41 percent drop from 90.74 in September meant growth for both Microsoft and Yahoo!, Google's biggest competitors in the search space. Bing's market share increased by 0.72 percent to 4.7 percent of all UK searches. Yahoo! enjoyed 3.33 percent of searches, a 0.50 percent increase over September.

"Clearly, Google still maintains a huge competitive edge over the other search engines in the UK market. There are 18 times more searches conducted on Google Sites than on all the other search engines combined," wrote Experian's James Murray. "However, this is encouraging news for Microsoft as Bing once again starts to gain some momentum and traction in the UK search market."

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Jane McEntegart
10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • captainblacko
    i still use google daily....but that's because its the default search engine in firefox.

    However bing is starting to grow on me. I love Bing Maps....but thats possibly because i was a user of its predecessor multimaps.
    Reply
  • myromance123
    I wonder how duckduckgo fares in all this.
    Reply
  • jnffarrell1
    Google is giving Microsoft enough rope to hang itself with knock out tactics learned from IBM and applied since the '90s to favor IE and other MS internet products. With Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8, MS makes it difficult to impossible for users to exercise their right to other browsers, other search, map, social, etc. Apps.

    When the smoke clears in the EU, reciprocal open interfaces for browsers, search, maps and Apps will apply to Google, Apple, Microsoft and other 'ecosystems'.
    Reply
  • bllue
    jnffarrell1Google is giving Microsoft enough rope to hang itself with knock out tactics learned from IBM and applied since the '90s to favor IE and other MS internet products. With Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8, MS makes it difficult to impossible for users to exercise their right to other browsers, other search, map, social, etc. Apps.When the smoke clears in the EU, reciprocal open interfaces for browsers, search, maps and Apps will apply to Google, Apple, Microsoft and other 'ecosystems'.What are you blabbering about? There's absolutely nothing stopping Google or anyone from releasing their own browser or search app in the W8 store. You can still change your default search provider, you can download apps for these search providers, nothing is stopping a user from using their favorite search provider. There's a map app included by default in W8 but nothing stops you from looking elsewhere (like Google Maps). Facebook, twitter, etc all play a big part in W8 store. There's a ton of apps for social services.

    And that's just on the Modern UI, in desktop mode there's absolutely NOTHING that can stop you from doing what you could do in previous OS.
    Reply
  • azraa
    Offtopic here, but:
    Can someone please tell me how the f*ck is Yahoo is still alive? ._.
    Reply
  • GreaseMonkey_62
    I'm pretty sure Yahoo, uses Bing for searches, so really this all growth for Bing.
    Reply
  • gm0n3y
    azraaOfftopic here, but:Can someone please tell me how the f*ck is Yahoo is still alive? ._.Email?
    Reply
  • neo_moco
    Omg the horror , the drama , google has only 89.9 share . They are going bankrupt. they drioped 2 % ... it is the end. Seriously ?

    Regardin yahoo : for example in my country everybody uses yahoo messenger ; i remmember in ~2000 yahoo had free e-mail and messenger and all started using it . Now we have gmail skype etc. but all are on ymessenger and you can`t change cus everybody is on it. Yahoo has like 40 % e-mail use in US so don`t worry ... they won`t die anytime soon.
    Reply
  • Wolygon
    Bing is excellent, the homepages images are a great start to the day.
    Reply
  • izmanq
    and they know this percentage is how ? :D how the hell they get the number of how many people using google search or others ? :P
    Reply