Google dominating UK search

Google is becoming an increasing source of traffic to key industries

Nearly nine out of 10 internet searches in the UK in June were powered by Google, compared to four per cent for Yahoo and just over three per cent for MSN.

The latest figures from monitoring company Hitwise suggest that the divvying up of market share moved only fractions of a per cent across the four main players during the month.

Google's domination is slightly less pronounced in the US, where it accounted for just over 69 per cent of all searches in June.

Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com received 19.6, 5.4 and 4.1 per cent respectively, further highlighting Microsoft's continued desire to acquire Yahoo to jointly tackle Google's domination.

Hitwise found that, although the figures are down slightly year on year, search engines continue to be the primary way for internet users to navigate key industry categories in the UK.

The figures also show that Google is becoming an increasing source of traffic to key industries.

Most notably, the online video and social networking categories continue to show double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from Google, at 17 per cent and 28 per cent respectively.