Search market share

April 2012 search engine market share

The search engine market in April 2012 is basically a tale of three companies - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Our pie charts show the share of overall searches for each company, using figures from digital research provider Hitwise.

Google enjoys the bulk of the UK search engine market share, handling 90.44 per cent of all queries, light years ahead of Yahoo with 2.51 per cent and Microsoft with 3.92 per cent. Across the Atlantic, it's slightly more balanced. Google's US search engine market share is still very healthy at 61 per cent, but it's not completely out of sight for Yahoo with 17 per cent and Microsoft with 15 per cent. 

Google - a winning formula

It has been a heady rise for Google. Many people struggle to believe that precocious students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company as recently as September 1998. Using a friend's garage as their base of operations, they only settled on a name after misspelling the maths term 'googol'. Despite such unpromising omens, Google's combination of clever algorithms, advanced search operators and sophisticated ad programs like AdWords quickly propelled it to the top of the search engine market. It has stayed there ever since.

So this is the state of the search engine market in 2012 - Google is dominating, Yahoo is struggling and Microsoft is growing