UK Internet Users make 2.2 Billion Search Engine Visits in One Month

Tuesday 20th March 2012

Internet usage data analyst Experian Hitwise has announced that UK netizens made a whopping 2.2 billion searches over the course of February 2012.

Unsurprisingly, Google accounted for the lion’s share of the searches, given its dominant position in the search industry. 9 out of 10 searches made by UK internet users were carried out on Google, leaving the likes of Yahoo!, Bing and other peripheral search engines to scrabble for the remaining 8.43%.

This February tally has seen Google increase its share of the UK search market by almost 1% more than January this year. As this market becomes more important to Google, the company continues to strengthen its presence by offering more IT jobs in London, Manchester and Dublin where it maintains offices.

Hitwise analysts have recorded an additional 174 million visits to search engines this February compared to the total visits recorded in the same month in 2011. Better broadband speeds and availability as well as the astonishing rise of internet use on mobile platforms such as tablet devices have been linked to the overall surge in search engine visits.

Despite a withering attack from ex-engineering director James Whittaker about Google’s controversial new privacy policy, the search giant doesn’t seem to be hurting for visits from the UK’ online population. Whittaker – currently a partner development manager at Microsoft – lambasted his former employers for implementing a policy which allows Google to pool personal information from users’ Android phones, Google searches and Gmail in order to make personalised targeted advertising.

“The Google I was passionate about was a technology company. The Google I left was an advertising company.” Whittaker said, adding: “Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information, so much so that they are willing to put the Facebook brand before their own.”

Google has good reason to worry. In the UK ‘facebook’ is the most popular search term by a large margin. This is remarkable in of itself since it seems most UK netizens still don’t use website bookmarks or the address bar to navigate to Facebook!

Regardless of their path taken to the world’s most popular social network, UK internet users spend more time on Facebook than any other website. This has led to a surge of UK IT jobs dedicated to managing companies’ social media presence. This trend shows no sign of reversing itself as more time and more searches are dedicated to social networking, with Facebook leading the pack.

Image Source: http://duvien.com/blog/turn-internet-explorer-googles-chrome-browser