92% of all internet searches in the UK come from Google

Google accounts for 92% of all internet searches in the UK, the latest figures from Experian Hitwise confirm. While Google’s search dominance in the UK, and indeed the world, is well documented, last month saw the internet giant breach unprecedented levels of UK market penetration, now at 92.02%.

Google’s share of internet searches in the UK for the month of June 2011 rose by 1.5% on the previous month, while overall the company witnessed a yearly search share growth of 0.2%.

Robin Goad, research director of Experian Hitwise commented,

“Google has certainly been dominant in search for the last ten years but even by Google’s high standards, to capture 92% of the UK search market is quite an achievement.

“In other markets like the US the search distribution is much more even, but in the UK Google has woven itself into the core fabric of Internet usage so much that other players are struggling to keep up.”

In today’s social web, the traditional search engine information retrieval paradigm is becoming less relevant. People are turning to more social services like Twitter and Facebook, where friends and acquaintances are the referrers of traffic. In June 2010, search engines accounted for around 38% of all web traffic in the UK. In the same period this year, this figure has fallen quite sharply to 34.29%.

The picture is not so perfect for other search engines vying the UK audience. In June 2011, Bing only accounted for 2.88% of all internet searches in the UK, down 0.24% on the previous year, while Yahoo! accounted for 2.96%, up very slightly by 0.03% on the previous year also.

In Ireland, Google’s dominance is even more apparent. According to StatCounter GlobalStats, 95.3% of all internet searches in Ireland came from Google in June 2011, up 0.79% on the previous year. Google is firmly planted in both the UK and Irish markets, something which will likely pervade for quite some time.

Image credit: Gayle Laakmann McDowell