The latest report released by Hitwise reveals that Google Search has crossed all its previous records as far as market share in the U.K. is concerned.
While Google had a market share of 90.53% in May 2011, in the U.K. it now has a market share of 92.02% for the month of June 2011. Similarly, a year-on-year comparison shows that Google had a market share of 91.82% in June last year.
In contrast, competitors Yahoo! and Microsoft jointly account for only 5.84% of the market share in search. This is a decrease of 1.49% compared to the share in May 2011 and a decrease of 0.21% compared to June 2010.
However, in spite of this growth, the overall share of search has reduced. In the past, search accounted for 40% of all traffic on the net. It now accounts for 34.29% of all traffic.
This result does not however mean that online search is on the decline. It only indicates that in spite of the fact that the overall number of searches are increasing, the percentage of traffic coming from search has declined because traffic from other sites, notably the social networks, is on the upswing.
A study of the traffic on social networks indicates that after a slight decline during the last three months, Facebook has now recovered and has the largest market share of all social networks at 53.72%. This is a growth of 0.11%.
YouTube, on the other hand, is the fastest growing social network in spite of being at the number two slot. It now accounts for 20.76% of all visits to social networks in the U.K.
In general, social networks are now the second largest source of traffic on the internet accounting for 12.54% of all traffic.
