Google’s share of the UK search industry has slipped between the months of January and February with both Bing and Yahoo! reaping the benefits, according to the AT Internet Institute.
Google lost 1.6% of their hold on the UK audience from January 2010, Google nevertheless remained dominant with a overwhelming remaining 89.2% share of the potential audience for search engine marketing. It is almost 9 visits out of 10 on average per website” across Europe, Google remains top in such countries as France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom was the only one of the four European countries tracked by AT that showed any significant change to Google’s share.
The drop in the share could be seen as quite a small percentage, but if Ask or AOL – ranked 4 and 5 in the UK – were to lose the same amount, they would entirely lose their UK audience (1.3% and 0.7% respectively). Additionally, this is one of the most significant changes to AT’s figures for the search market share since the launch of Bing back in June 2009.
Only one month ago, Google had gained 0.7% and Bing had dropped 0.3%; for the past year or so Google has been slow increases in its search market share. Now, in the space of just one month Bing has regained its lost share and Google has dropped an entire percentage for the first time in over six months.
It is expected over the next few months, the UK search market could see further changes; Bing is set to launch a three month Television and online campaign in the UK, with the aim of becoming the 2nd most used search engine in the UK.
If the ad campaign successfully builds brand awareness throughout the UK for Bing, it is thought Microsoft’s product could become a much more attractive prospect for investment in search engine marketing campaigns through PPC search ads and/or strategic SEO.
How will Google respond to this? It is unsure but we for sure will be monitoring the situation very closely.

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