Searches for Google Chrome Spike in the UK

Google is putting a lot of weight behind Chrome, now that its content with its maturity is starting to actively promote it, at least in the UK where it launched pretty big offline advertising campaign touting the browser's strong points. And it seems to be paying off, bolstered by the recent beta releases and the Extensions Gallery on top of the advertising campaign, Chrome-related searches have almost doubled overtaking those for Internet Explorer.

"UK Internet searches for Google Chrome have almost doubled over the last couple of weeks and are currently running at their third highest level since the browser was launched towards the end of last summer," Robin Goad, research director, Hitwise UK, said.

"Searches for Google Chrome overtook those for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer last week. However, as the chart below illustrates, Google still has some way to go before Chrome has the level of brand awareness associated with its main competitor in the ‘alternative browser’ world, Mozilla Firefox," he added.

The numbers speak for themselves and, for the most part are easily explained. The fact that there are now more searches for Chrome than Internet Explorer doesn't really mean anything. IE comes bundled with every Windows PC, so there aren't going to be a lot of people searching for it in order to obtain it. And since it doesn't work on anything else except Windows, the only time anyone is going to search for IE will be when they need more info.

On the other hand, the way most people go about installing Firefox, or Chrome for that matter, is they first search for a download location which most likely means that most of these searches are related to this. That explains why the number of searches for "Firefox" or "Mozilla Firefox" is several times greater than those for Chrome, Firefox is still a lot more popular than any other 'alternative' browser at the moment.