Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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April 02, 2008
How popular is Google's "pages from the UK" search option?
Have you ever wondered what proportion of people searching on Google UK (www.google.co.uk) choose the ‘pages from the UK’ option?
Following on from our recent analysis of the local search market in the UK, we were certainly interested in answering this question. So, we ran a Hitwise conversions report over 4 weeks during March to find the answer, and the results are illustrated below.
As you can see from the table, the results were pretty consistent during the four weeks we analyzed, averaging out at 13.6% of searchers choosing the ‘pages from the UK’ option – equivalent to about 1 in 7. Interestingly, the proportion choosing the UK only option seems to be in decline, although we’ll have to wait for more data to determine whether that is a genuine long term trend.
The table below lists the top 10 search engines in the UK during the same 4 week period. By applying the percentage of UK specific searches to Google UK’s market share and creating a ‘new’ search engine, "Google UK Pages from UK only", it would be the third largest in the UK with a market share of 10.03%, behind "Google UK All The Web" and google.com. This 'new' search engine, consisting of Google searchers only looking at UK pages, would have a market share more than three times that of its nearest non-Google competitor, Yahoo! UK.
Posted by Robin Goad at 05:00 PM
Posted to Google | Search
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Comments
It would be great to see some figures for other european Googles.
Posted by: Gerrit Eicker at 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 at 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 at 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 at April 3, 2008 10:48 AM
Great - I'll keep my eyes on the blog.
Posted by: Tom at 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 at 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 at May 6, 2008 09:15 AM
