Google dominating UK searching

87% of the market

18 July 2008 11:00 GMT / By Katie Scott

Google has increased its market share of the UK search business.

It's official - more and more of us are turning to Google for all of our search needs.

The web company was responsible for 87% of the country's search enquiries last month through Google.co.uk or Google.com.

According to figures from Hitwise, this is up from 79.5% in the same month last year.

In contrast, the other ranked search engines all fell over the last month.

Yahoo was ranked second, but dropped from 7.7% in June last year to 4% last month.

Microsoft slipped from 5.7 to 3.7%, while Ask dropped its share from 4.6 to 3.1% over the year to June.

While Google's dominance is steady, what we are actually searching for is changing.

"Comparing June 2008 to June 2007, the online video and social-networking categories continue to show double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from Google – 17% and 28% respectively", explains Hitwise.

Over in the States, Google also reigns supreme, with 69.2% of search share, followed by Yahoo with a 19.6% bite.