Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

It would be great to see some figures for other european Googles.

Posted by Gerrit Eicker | April 2, 2008 05:41 PM

Hi Gerrit - thanks for the comment. Unfortunately we don't this information for other European countries, but may well do this analysis for our Asian markets in the future.

Robin

Posted by Robin Goad | April 3, 2008 08:34 AM

Great post Robin - thanks for sharing such useful information :-)

Do you have information like bounce rate or CTR to a search result? Would be very interesting to see if there was any way of comparing the quality of the 'pages from the uk' results to the main google.co.uk searches.

Posted by Tom | April 3, 2008 10:11 AM

Tom - very good question! The data that we have has given us some insight on this for Google, but we need to dig a little deeper, and also do similar analysis for the other engines. The data we have so far looks very interesting, so keep an eye on the blog, as we'll certainly publish it here first!

Robin

Posted by Robin Goad | April 3, 2008 10:48 AM

Great - I'll keep my eyes on the blog.

Posted by Tom | April 3, 2008 02:03 PM

What would be most interesting for me is the actual types of searches done, how does that 13% play out when the query is:

- Local
- B2B
- Ecommerce

Thanks for continuing to share your information!
-Wil

Posted by Wil Reynolds | April 7, 2008 01:54 PM

Love to see this broken down by category. We did this at iCrossign last year and found there was almost a 30% UK only searches for some sectors like retail. But much less for other like flights

Posted by Nilhan | May 6, 2008 09:15 AM

I also would dearly like to uncover this behaviour across european markets, as we cannot be sure how consistent this behaviour is. With different liberalisation domain policies across EU, some markets may have +/- legacy of .com v .net v .fr/es etc

I suspect inertia drives many users from selecting "results from their country" option. Unless the results users discover from a default google search are irrelevant it would appear few select this refinement.

Posted by Paulos72 | June 18, 2008 11:42 AM

This is great information! Thank you!

Do you have the same stats available for the Yahoo and ASK.com engines as well?

kindest regards

Josh

Posted by Josh Ruding | July 6, 2008 03:32 PM

Hi Josh - I'm afraid that we had to do some customized work to get this data. Therefore we don't have any plans to recreate it for the other search engines on this blog. However, if you were interested in us looking into it, please feel free to drop me an email and I'd be happy to look into it for you.

Thanks, Robin

Posted by Robin Goad | July 7, 2008 07:54 AM

Excellent Robin, thanks for sharing this! I was looking for these exact stats, after discussing .com vs .co.uk strategy when advising a client. Thanks again, Simon :)

Posted by Simon Turnbull | July 25, 2008 12:13 PM

I'd also love to see this broken down by sector.

I'd be interested to know what the percentage is like for the property/real estate sector. I am making assumptions that a higher percentage surely must select UK when searching for UK property, due to the amount of towns and cities in the US with the same names.

Thanks,

Annah

Posted by Annah | August 15, 2008 09:33 AM

The default setting of search box is "pages from web" is active by default, thus only sophisticated users use "pages from UK" like option. thats what i think about the numbers you have presented here. from SEO point of view it must be considered while optimizing a website for particular region or country/.

Posted by ranky | October 21, 2008 09:08 AM

Good stuff ... only slightly related, but would you have any idea of volume of Google searches that have a "local" search term ie might be classified as "local" - or know anyone who might??

Posted by adam cole | January 26, 2009 06:37 PM

Hi Adam - that's a very good question, and it's something that we plan to look into. Keep an eye on the blog for some research in late February / early March.

Thanks, Robin

Posted by Robin Goad | January 26, 2009 06:44 PM

Found your article when looking for the answer to this very question. This is crucial from an seo perspective as sites rank very differently depending on which search option is used. Makes sense that the majority use the default.

Posted by Tony | June 25, 2009 08:47 AM

I've been looking around the web for these stats, so thanks for putting them together.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of how the search topic affects the use of the "show me uk searches only" button, i.e. are searchers more inclined to select the "uk search only" button if they are searching for a product.

Posted by Al Mackin | August 4, 2009 02:22 PM

I have 2 sites hosted by the same american company http://www.abc2mp3.com has good listings on "the Web" and uk is even better. But our new site http://www.pawleypets.com shows up on the web but is non-existant on uk search. This is a pain but, the real problem is if we target uk in addwords it claims the site is poor quality and will not show show our adds even if we pay silly money. As we are based in UK I need help!!!!!!

Posted by Tom | September 16, 2009 08:48 PM

Did the trend for declining numbers of users selecting the UK only option continue?

Posted by Liam Delahunty | November 20, 2009 01:25 PM