Last month I mentioned that we regularly get requests for data on the top search engines and social networks in the UK. Last time the focus of my blog was Microsoft’s search engine Bing, but this month the spotlight is definitely on YouTube.

YouTube was the fastest growing social network in April for the second consecutive month. The online video website now accounts for 1 in 5 visits to a social network from UK Internet users, up from 1 in 6 visits back in April 2010. As you can see from the table below however, it still has some way to go to catch Facebook.

YouTube is now firmly established as the 3rd biggest website in the UK, overtaking Hotmail in December 2010. You can see from the chart below that since April 2008 YouTube has slowly being climbing the rankings to go from eighth to third most visited website in the UK. So far in 2011, YouTube has been consistently ranked number three, and Hotmail (now ranked fourth) doesn’t look like catching YouTube.

In the search engine market there was a reversal of fortunes for Bing this month as it lost market share of searches to Google. Google Sites extended their dominance in the search market by 0.82% between March and April 2011, accounting for 90.84% of all searches conducted by UK Internet users in April.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Yahoo! Sites both lost market share in terms of searches during April. Bing dropped to just over 4% of all searches conducted by UK Internet users, whilst Yahoo! Sites accounted for 3.15% of searches. Ask Sites also dipped in April, losing 0.19% market share during this period.
The movement in the search market means that Google is not only the industry leader in the UK but was also the fastest moving search engine for the month. Yahoo! saw the greatest loss in market share in April, but was still ahead of its position last year.
Come back next month to check the latest search and social update and don’t forget you can keep yourself informed on all the latest developments by following us on Twitter.