Bing Rallies To Second In Search But Facebook Suffers

Bing is once again the UK’s second favourite search engine after regaining some of June’s lost market, according to Experian Hitwise. Social networking giant Facebook on the other hand saw its share of all social network visits drop to its lowest since October 2009.

The online intelligence service’s latest Search Engine and Social Analysis reports a good month for Microsoft’s search tool, which claimed 3.84 percent of the UK’s internet searches in July.

Last month Bing surrendered second spot to Yahoo but this month it is the only site to have achieved any notable growth and the figures suggest it made much of its 0.96 percent gain from Google, which lost 0.98 percent.

Giants of the Internet

Google, however, remains the search game’s giant, handling 91.04 percent of the UK’s searches. Yahoo is back in third with three percent.

“Microsoft has recovered from last month’s blip to once again become the UK’s second most popular search provider,” said Robin Goad, Research Director of Experian Hitwise.

“The key for Bing now is to hold on to its gains in the search market and build on its strengths which differentiate it from Google and the other engines.”

Facebook’s total share of the UK’s social network visits is now 50.14 percent, down 3.58 percent compared to last month and 4.46 percent compared to last year. YouTube is still a distant second to Facebook with 22.54 percent.

Despite uncertainty over its profitability, YouTube has been enjoying sustained growth, according to Experian Hitwise, especially in the mobile space.

One in every 35 visits to a website by UK Internet users now goes to YouTube and one in 20 YouTube visits is from a mobile device on a home Wi-Fi network. That does not take into account the millions of visits over 3G networks, says Experian’s Goad.

He also said: “Now firmly entrenched as the UK’s third most visited website after Google UK and Facebook, YouTube continues to make advances in the field of online video.”

The search term ‘youtube’ was also the UK’s third most searched term this month. The most popular search term was ‘facebook’, ‘ebay’ was second

Searching and socialising

Hitwise reported in March last year that Facebook had overtaken Google as the most visited website in the US. Around the same time, comScore said that search queries on Facebook grew from 395 million in January 2010 to 436 million in February 2010 – a growth of 10 percent in a month.

Since then, Facebook has deepened its relationship with Microsoft Bing on social search, further blurring the lines between search and social media. The Bing search engine now shows users which sites and products their Facebook friends like.