08
2010
Social networks now more popular than search engines in the UK
Social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines. During May, social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%. May was the first ever month that social networks have been more popular than search engines in the UK.
Facebook accounts for 55% of all UK social networking visits, almost three times as many as the next most popular social network, YouTube. Twitter, one of the fastest growing and most talked about websites of the last two years, is now the third most popular social network in the UK, putting it ahead of former favourites such as Bebo and MySpace.
However, despite its popularity Facebook doesn’t yet dominate the UK social networking market to the extent that Google dominates the search market. Together www.google.co.uk and www.google.com accounted for nine in every ten web searches carried out in the UK during May. Consequently Google UK was the most visited website in the UK during May, accounting for 9.29% of all visits. Facebook, in second place, accounted for 7.04% of all UK Internet visits during the same month.
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Social networks now more popular than search engines in the UK
So is this big news from Hitwise? ” Social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines
“However, despite its popularity Facebook doesn’t yet dominate the UK social networking market to the extent that Google dominates the search market.”
Should that not be:
“However, despite its popularity Facebook doesn’t yet dominate the UK SEARCH market to the extent that Google dominates the search market.”
?
Imran-UK
In which universe is youtube a social network? How many “youtube friends” do you have? You guys seriously need to rethink your definitions.
But are the people using social networks to search for things they used to find via search engines?
This is big news and with Yahoo linking up with Facebook this week Google’s dominance may be in for a challenge this year.
I think YouTube should really be classified as a search engine
From a Comscore study:
“YouTube not only had 50% more searches than Yahoo web search (3.918B vs 2.629B) and 180% more searches than Bing (3.918B vs 1.399B), but the number of searches at the online video giant made up almost 28% (27.95) of the total searches on Google sites for Dec. 2009.”
I realise you can comment and create a profile but as a % of what people use it for (as opposed to any of the other sites you have catagorised in “Social Networking and Forums”) is more for searching and less for social networking.
My 2p
Facebook is a huge time consumer but lacks Google’s ad options. YouTube is both search and social, but about shearing so social most applicable.
YouTube is always a controversial one in this context. the reason we classify it in our Social Networks and Forums category is because it has a lot of social capabilties, such as: the ability to create accounts and upload videos to your account, the vast amount of user generate content on there, the large amount of comments its attracts (plus video responses), the ability to follow other users (not quite freinds a la Facebook, but a similar principle).
However, regardless of whether or not it is social network, I strongly disagree with the idea that youtube is a search engine. Yes, you can search for things on it and millions of people do, but this is also true or Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, etc… and most people would not consider them to Search engines. Searches on YouTube are internal site search and the results only include YouTube pages, whereas a real search engine provides multiple searches (for example, Google, Bing and Yahoo! Video search sites are all classified as search engines).
Thanks, Robin
I guess it is too early to comment and conclude, but it could be the beginning of a trend of technology-consumers moving away from information-gathering for business and academic research to entertainment and socialising. It will also be interesting to see if there is a parallel change in the age of tech-consumers.
Interesting graph, but I don’t think that it tells the whole story. Last year also showed a dip in traffic to search engines like the one this May, so if the search category recovers as it did last year, then within a month or two it will have retaken the lead over social.
Also, while social is growing its share more rapidly than search, both categories are still increasing their overall share, which must mean that other categories are losing traffic to social sites and to search engines. What are people no longer using the internet for ?
I agree with some of the previous comments. Search and social are not substitues, search doesn’t have content (it directs you), social should have content. I can use Google to find someone on Twitter or FB.
Hi Robin
I have two questions for you.
1. Do you think Bing’s good success record in search will help them gain market share in the long run over Google? (who’s success record is not as good)
2. Where does Linked-in feature? did it not make the cut in the social networking table? is there a table for professional based social networking?
Thanks,
Guy
I think a lot of people miss the point when reading these kinds of stats. The significance for sites here is recognising that social network users are using these sites for all kinds of reasons – often answering each others questions and influencing their decision making.
So regardless of whether they are searching for information on a classic search engine or sharing it with each other, we can no longer stay in the wings ‘to see what happens’. This demonstrates what has happened quite clearly – even though we may not fully understand the consumption behaviour yet.
As an information provider we recognise the direction(s) we need to take and are spending a lot of time trying to better understand all aspects of our target markets.
I’m also interested where Linked in would be if it was on the Social Networking category.
If Alexa have it at number 12 in the UK then where would Hitwise put it?
Although I have heard similar comments regarding using social network sites as search tools, I would never associate them as such and find it difficult to imagine why anyone would? If you want information on almost any subject, surely you can find it through search engines very easily.
Maybe you might ask one of your contacts on your social network sites for information on a specific topic which you know they are familiar with or involved with, but otherwise?
Interesting graph, but I don’t think that it tells the whole story. Last year also showed a dip in traffic to search engines like the one this May, so if the search category recovers as it did last year, then within a month or two it will have retaken the lead over social.
Also, while social is growing its share more rapidly than search, both categories are still increasing their overall share, which must mean that other categories are losing traffic to social sites and to search engines. What are people no longer using the internet for ?
This is a very nice list of do follow and no follow sites and I believe these are good for natural link building, I used half of these sites and they are already helping drive traffic to my blog.
This data is definitely interesting, but I’m not so sure if it is conclusive. I definitely log on to Facebook multiple times everyday, but Google is still my homepage. I personally use Google for almost every search I do, whether it be on my desktop, laptop or smart phone. I don’t feel that social networking sites are used to find information the same way the search engines are. The graph here shows that you have indeed done some noteworthy multivariate testing, and there is no denying the extreme popularity of social networking sites. Maybe I am just in the minority.