Google takes almost 90% of UK internet searches

Google: nine out of ten UK web-surfers prefer it
Google: nine out of ten UK web-surfers prefer it

Results from Hitwise show quite conclusively that Google is the king of the search engine, with a massive 87.30 per cent of searches made through Google’s site.

The results, which were from May this year, were down on April where the site took a wince-inducing 87.69 per cent of market share. Compared to a year ago, though, searches are up by nearly 10 per cent.

The statistics include all websites searched for with a .com or .co.uk suffix and were from a sample of 8.4 million internet users.

Google dominance

The results are taken from UK figures and show that other sites like Yahoo!, MSN and Ask pale into comparison, with just a 4.09 per cent, 3.72 per cent and 3.07 per cent share respectively.

Yahoo! is actually worse off, shedding half of its searches in a year. The company's market share is down from 8.5 per cent a year ago to just 4.09 per cent today.

According to the Guardian, the same can’t quite be said of Google in the US. Though its market share is up, it’s only up by 3 per cent, from 65.1 per cent to 68.3 per cent. This is because Yahoo! has more of a dominance taking 19.95 per cent in what is still essentially a one-horse race.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.