Google Loses Some Of Its Appeal In October

Google suffered its first disappointing month for the past five years in the UK search market after seeing its market share slip below 90% to 89.33% in October, as I read in the latest analysis from market research company Experian Hitwise.

The negative trend in Google’s October performance was beneficial to smaller rivals, leaving room for Microsoft, Yahoo!, Ask and other search engines to gain some momentum. Microsoft’s search tool Bing, in particular, scored its best result this year, boosting its market share by 0.72% over the month, and by 0.86% in annual terms, to 4.71%. The growth could be attributed to the release of Windows 8 in October, which has Bing as its default search engine. The software giant’s latest operating system also enjoyed strong interest from consumers, with Internet searches for Windows 8 staging an impressive 120% growth throughout the month. The result gives Microsoft a breath of fresh air since it proves that Bing is gaining a solid foothold in the UK search market again.

Yahoo! also recorded a slight improvement, seeing its share edging up by 0.50% month-on-month to 3.33%. Ask also fared better than in September, capturing 2.13% of the market, or 0.13% more than the previous month.

Despite, the drop, Google remains the most popular search engine among UK consumers and still commands the largest share in the country’s search engine market. According to Experian Hitwise’s estimates, Google registered searches that were 18 times more than those conducted on other platforms altogether throughout October.