Top five search engines used by Brits

15th April 2020

Searching for information online has become a regular part of life for people across the UK. In fact, we would be surprised if "Google it" was not uttered by most people on a daily basis. With this information in mind, it is more important than ever for businesses to have a search engine friendly website.

You might be surprised to hear that Google is not the only game in town. While they do hold the majority of the market, there are new (and old) competitors nipping at their heels every day. With that in mind, here are the top five search engines used by Brits:

5. MSN

This one feels like cheating, but Microsoft directs 0.04% of UK search engine traffic to Bing through their classic MSN homepage.

Many will certainly remember when MSN was the homepage on just about every home computer. For some people, old habits die hard.

4. DuckDuckGo

Privacy-focused dark horse DuckDuckGo is still relatively new to the search engine game; at least compared to the others on this list. That has not stopped them from carving out a growing portion of British search engine users though; they hold a 0.78% market share.

Privacy is on the minds of many people in the UK; perhaps a little more so than the rest of the world, as DuckDuckGo doesn't appear in the top five global search engines at all.

3. Yahoo

90s favourite Yahoo may be less of a player in the search engine game than they used to be, but they have managed to cling on to a 2.12% share of UK searchers. This is a little lower than the 2.83% they hold globally.

Yahoo search has been around for 25 years now and despite what appears to be a small market share, they are still the fourth most popular search engine in the world.

2. Bing

The Microsoft underdog holds a respectable 8.82% of the UK search engine market. It turns out that Brits are a little more partial to Bing than the rest of the world, as the search engine has a smaller 5.53% market share globally.

Considering how popular Bing is in Great Britain, it makes a lot of sense to pay attention to them when developing a search engine friendly website.

1. Google

Google receives a staggering 87.5% of UK search engine traffic, but you probably aren't surprised to hear that. You do not get to reach a trillion-dollar market cap without doing something right.

Because Google drives such a high percentage of searches in the UK it is with certainty the most important search engine to consider. If you want a search engine friendly website you’re basically saying that you want a Google friendly website.

Conclusion

All of these search engines have their own little niches in the UK market. We do not think anyone was shocked to see that Google is the clear winner in terms of volume, but they are each important in their own little ways.

The exact market share of these search engines obviously varies from month to month. We used data from January 2020 to provide the figures for this article.