Google Owns More than 90 Percent of All Searches in the UK

Google may be dominating the search space globally, but 'dominate' can mean quite a different thing from country to country. In the US, Google has about 65 percent of the market. In the UK, its share is at over 90 percent.

While it has been stuck at that level for a lot of time, having gained just 0.68 percent points in one year, Google isn't losing any market share any time soon either.

The competition, if you can call it that, is Microsoft with under four percent of the search market and Yahoo with under three percent. Considering just how small Yahoo and Bing are, Ask seems to be positively thriving in the UK.

"Google Sites maintained their dominance of the search market in November with a slight increase of 0.05 per cent market share of total UK Internet searches. This took Google to 91.07 per cent of all UK searches, up from 90.39 per cent in November 2010," Experian Hitwise explained.

"Microsoft Sites had a slight dip in market share between October and November but still held 3.84 per cent of all searches conducted by UK Internet users for the month," it added.

"However, Microsoft was still up year-on-year by 0.49 per cent demonstrating the continued growth of the second largest search provider in the UK," it said.

The UK is Google second largest market, in terms of revenue, outside of the US. The fact that the vast majority of people use its search engine, and therefore see its ads, certainly does help with that.

Google enjoys similarly huge market shares in plenty of places in Europe. It's understandable then, perhaps, why European regulators seem more adamant in scrutinizing Google's dominance of the search market. In fact, regulators are just getting ready to reveal the findings of their year-long investigation and may even file suit against Google early next year.