Experian Hitwise UK, a web analytics company, has today announced that Microsoft is getting close to 4% of the search market in the UK. This news is apparent in the company’s latest finding which show that Bing increased it’s market share by 0.22% in October of this year. Both Google and Yahoo! sites lost search market share last month in the UK.
It is interesting to look at the year on year change for the UK search market as this time last year Yahoo! was the UK’s the second most used search engine behind Google, however that is no longer true as Bing is currently second. A year ago Google was massively dominant in the UK search market with over 91% of internet searches using the search engine and the same is still true now. But, over the past year Google has lost 0.13% where as Microsoft has gained 0.64% which actually seems to be at the expense of Yahoo! which has lost 0.66%. Interestingly the Ask search engine is also experiencing growth in the UK.
Whilst these percentage figures are small it is interesting to see that Microsoft increased its market share by 0.22% last month, over a third of what it has gained over the last year. It will be interesting to see if this growth continues in November and on towards Christmas as then Bing would have over 4% of the UK search market; a nice Christmas present for Microsoft.
I’m not sure what has prompted this small but significant growth in Bing throughout October, I was unaware of any new advertising for the decision engine.
Image credit Experian Hitwise UK.