Google UK Search Market Share Drops… to 90 Percent

Google has lost some of its search engine market share in the UK to Bing, following an aggressive campaign by Microsoft and the release of Windows 8.

Just 89.33 percent of users turned to Google’s search engine in October, while Bing attracted 5 percent of the market. This is the lowest result for Google in the past five years.

Bing it On

According to data on eight million users collected by Experian Hitwise, the popularity of Google’s search engine dropped 1.41 percent in a single month. While this might not pose immediate danger to Google, the Guardian has suggested that if this decline continues indefinitely, Bing might become the leading search engine by 2016.

Overall, Bing gained almost a whole percentage point this year, but is still making a loss for Microsoft.

Analysts suggest the redistribution of market share is related to the launch of Windows 8, since the OS features default Bing integration. For the last few months, the search engine was aggressively promoted alongside Internet Explorer 10.

Researchers also note that Bing is the default search engine on Facebook, and that could have an influence on its market share.

Earlier this year, Microsoft revamped the look of Bing to make it easier to use on smartphones and tablets, before launching a “Bing It On” campaign that encouraged users to find alternatives to Google. The company later claimed that in blind comparison tests, two thirds of users preferred Web search results from Bing.

The third most popular search engine was Yahoo, followed by independent project Ask Jeeves.

“In the UK, Bing has been using very aggressive tactics of promotion for last few months, in preparation for the Christmas season. But Google is still dominant, and we would need to see a trend over more months to call it a consistent decline,” Luca Paderni from Forrester Research told the BBC.

Google’s position in the charts varies around the world. It is a distant second in both China and Russia, where local products Baidu and Yandex enjoy the dominant position. However, one of its hidden strengths is device integration – almost all Android smartphones and tablets feature Google products by default.

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