Overall, Google remains consistent as the most popular search engine in the UK, not so closely followed by Ask and Windows Live. Yahoo! ranks in 4th place with the search engine continuing to see traffic drop, and shows no real sign of catching up with their nearest rivals any time soon.
First of all let's have a closer look at the performance of the star pupil, the king of search engines.....step forward Google. With over 29 million unique visitors in April 08 Google continues to hold its place at the top of the search engine league table. This is a 13% increase on last years' figures, with Google showing a consistent increase of around 1% month on month. When we look at the breakdown of this traffic between Google.com and Google.co.uk we find that unsurprisingly the .co.uk domain takes the majority share of UK traffic, with 29 million unique visitors in April compared to 19 million for .com. The combined force of these two domains puts Google over 10 million visitors clear at the top of the 'most popular' list. With the steady increase in visitors showing no signs of faltering, it doesn't look like anyone is close to stealing Google's crown just yet.
One search engine which is currently on the up is Ask. With 15 million unique visitors in April 08 this is a 6% increase on last year. The Ask.co.uk domain gets a much higher level of UK traffic than Ask.com , with the UK domain accounting for 12 million unique visitors in April, compared to just 2 million for .com. From the first graph we can see that Ask.co.uk has been kicking at the heels of Live.com for past few months, with Ask overtaking this month to become the 3rd top search domain.
Next up is MSN Live, which has a slightly less positive report than the above. There were 11 million unique visitors in April which is a drop of 6% on last year. When we break this down to UK and .com domains we find that for UK users the Windows Live domain (search.live.com) is used more often, with 11 million unique visitors compared to just 5 million for MSN UK (search.msn.co.uk). The drop in traffic over the past year has been more pronounced for MSN UK with monthly drops of between 1-13% since January. However, with the recent announcement that MSN Live are to start a cashback scheme, we might see traffic start to pick up in the next few months as money hungry searchers rethink their search engine preferences.
Finally we have another not so rosy performance report for Yahoo!. With 8 million visitors in April 08, Yahoo! is down by 10% on last year, with traffic consistently dropping over the past few months. Similar to Google and Ask, the majority of UK users are searching on the .co.uk domain, with 6 million unique visitors on Yahoo.co.uk and 3 million on Yahoo.com. In the search engine rankings Yahoo! currently sits in 4th place, behind MSN Live and Ask. However since the beginning of the year Yahoo.co.uk traffic has been higher than MSN.co.uk, and Yahoo.com is consistently higher than Ask.com. With Yahoo currently sitting in 4th place, a few million visitors behind its nearest rivals, it looks like they may soon need to up their game if they want to stand a chance of climbing up the rankings into the illustrious top 3.
