Apr
12
2011
12
2011
Bing fastest moving search engine in the UK
People are always asking us: What are the most popular search engines and social networks in the UK? Search and social are the two biggest sources of traffic delivering visits to websites in the UK, so it’s understandable that these two massive drivers of traffic peak people’s interest.
As this is a popular request we decided to issue a press release today that highlights the top search engines and social networks by UK Internet usage. This is something we will do on a monthly basis to monitor the shifting landscape of these fast-growing industries.
In March you can see that Bing is the fastest growing search engine in the UK, increasing its market share of searches by 0.28% between February and March 2011. This might not sound like much, but when you consider the billions of searches conducted every month in the UK, this translates to a lot of extra searches occurring in Bing.
The growth of Bing is more pronounced in the year-on-year figures. Between March 2010 and March 2011 Bing was the only search engine to increase its volume of searches from UK Internet users. Whilst Google, Yahoo!, Ask and other search providers all dipped in year-on-year change, Microsoft Sites improved their market share of searches by 1.43%.
Google is still very much the dominant player in UK search, with Google Sites accounting for over 90% of all searches conducted by UK Internet users. However, between February and March 2011, Google Sites lost 0.66% market share of searches.
In the social sphere, Facebook continued its dominance, accounting for over 56% of all visits to social networks from UK Internet users in March 2011. However, Facebook’s market share of visits declined in March compared to February by 1.22%, mostly driven by increased visits to YouTube. The UK’s most popular online video site accounted for 19.06% of all visits to social networks in March, up from 18.32% in February, making YouTube the fastest growing social network of March.
March was a busy month for social networks and for YouTube in particular. Big events which have sparked interest online including the tsunami in Japan, Charlie Sheen quitting Two and a Half Men and the Rebecca Black Friday music video have all sent people to YouTube to watch topical video content.
Keep tuned for next month’s update and don’t forget you can keep yourself informed on all the latest developments by following us on Twitter.
It will be interesting to see if this growth continues, particularly once Bing starts serving the search results for Yahoo later this year.
It would be great to see if there were any significant differences in the demographics of users of the various sites. Perhaps a post for another time ?
Bing is definitely making deals to improve their position against Google and it seems to be working well. I think their dealings with Facebook may be one of their smartest moves, but I still wouldn’t discount Bing’s accuracy and marketing as a major factor. Bing’s itself (not including Yahoo) has seen it’s market share increase by over 50% in less than a year. Since Bing started providing the Yahoo search results Yahoo’s share has also increased about 7%. That’s pretty significant.
Yea right. With the recent IAB internet ad revenues release shares an increase of twenty-six percent from 2009 and being search as the most popular guy in the category, there is no doubt that Bing also enjoys fair share of increase. Not to mention their relations with the social media manic Facebook .
It’s unfortunate that we have to read about Charlie Sheen, Rebecca Black & the Japanese earthquake all in the same sentence. But, on the other hand, it explains a lot about society.
I do not believe that the Bing will be growing like this. What will be major factors of diverting people to Bing? Favoring facebook will also be the major factors.