UK and US search engine traffic
Everyone knows that search engine traffic worldwide is on the increase. But what are the latest reliable statistics? Nielson//NetRatings,
the world's leading internet research company has just published it's latest figures (October 2006), and the numbers are a real eye-opener.
In the UK alone almost 23 million searches are conducted every day. This equates to nearly 1 million searches every hour or 16,000 searches per minute! A staggering
706 million searches were undertaken by UK searchers in August 2006 resulting in around 546 million click-throughs.
Meanwhile, in the US there were over 5 billion searches in the top 5 search engines during September 2006. Between January 2005 and January 2006 the overall number of
searches in the US increased by a massive 39%.
The most popular search engines
In the UK, Google is by far the most popular search engine with around 68% market share. By comparison, Yahoo has just over 9% of the market with Ask at 8%, MSN at 6%
and AOL at 4%.
In the US the picture is slightly different. Here Google and Yahoo are the market leaders. Google remains the most popular but with a smaller market share at around 50%.
Yahoo is next with a significant 24%. Following behind are MSN at 9%, AOL at 6% and Ask at 3%.
In the UK Google is extending it's market dominance while in the US, market share remains relatively unchanged. While Google’s overall share of the market remains more
or less the same, year on year growth has increased by a massive 24%. This equates to an estimated 2.8 billion monthly searches by Google users in the US.
What are people searching for?
There are some excellent resources available which show what people are searching for on the various search engines. One such resource is Google Zeitgeist
where you can view the most popular global search queries on Google as well as country specific searches broken down by month and year. Looking through some of the pages at Zeitgeist you can see that search
trends from around the world can sometimes be the same, but more often are quite different. Here is an example from August 2006 which compares global search results with those from the UK.
For the week ending August 28, 2006 these were the most popular gaining queries in Google:
- pluto
- national hurricane center
- hurricane ernesto
- natascha kampusch
- silent hill
- emmys
- cheetah girls
- apple battery recall
- beerfest
- tom cruise
Meanwhile, in the UK, the most popular queries during August were as follows:
- bbc
- mayo clinic
- myspace
- big brother
- amazon
- autotrader
- easyjet
- ryanair
- pizco (social networking site)
- faceparty (social networking site)
Notes
