MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Stats reveal that 1 in every 7 UK searchers chooses to use the “Pages from the UK” option within Google. This isn’t surprising considering that local search is becoming more popular and the main reason for this? When searching locally to find products or a service, there is more chance of you receiving results that are more relevant and accessible to you.

Stats also show that the most used search engine in the UK is Google.co.uk with 73% (stats taken on the volume of searches for the 4 weeks ending March 29, 2008 by HitwiseUK). Robin Goads writes in his blog that about 13.6 per cent of the users in the United Kingdom search for UK pages only. This means if Google had to create a search engine that only featured Google UK pages from Britain it would be the 3rd largest search engine in Britain, beaten only by Google.co.uk and Google.com.

This shows something blatantly obvious: Google’s search engine rules UK search market. The question I ask myself is, can Yahoo!, MSN Live or even both combined catch up with Google? I honestly don’t think so, and I think Yahoo! have realised this and that’s why they have gone full throttle into the social media. Off the top off my head examples would include Yahoo! buzz, Yahoo! answers and Yahoo! 360.

The major way MSN Live, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Ask etc make their money is through advertising; so the one with the biggest audience is the happiest. It comes down to capturing an audience. I’m generalising quite a bit here, and I realise that they have many different services and means, but Google’s main way of capturing its audience is through their search engine. The lesser search engines have been left in the dust, especially in Britain. Yahoo! have been very clever in the way they are honing in on the social media side of the internet, and because they have captured a major audience in this area, they’re able to be a lot more competitive with Google.

So does it really matter that Google’s superior search engine rules the UK users? Yes, of course: it’s a major audience to capture, but it’s not the “be all and end all” of search. There are many different ways of navigating the web, and as long as Yahoo!, MSN etc find new and better ways of capturing that audience, Google will never hold a full monopoly.