As of January 2025, online search engine Bing accounted for 12.23 percent of the global desktop search market, while market leader Google had a share of around 78.83 percent. Meanwhile, Yahoo's market share was 3.07 percent. Google in the global market Ever since the introduction of Google Search in 1997, the company has dominated the search engine market, while the shares of all other tools has been rather lopsided. The majority of Google revenues are generated through advertising. Its parent corporation, Alphabet, was one of the biggest internet companies worldwide as of 2023, with a market capitalization of 1,6 trillion U.S. dollars. The company has also expanded its services to mail, productivity tools, enterprise products, mobile devices, and other ventures. As a result, Google earned one of the highest tech company revenues in 2023 with roughly 305.6 billion U.S. dollars. Search engine usage in different countries Google is the most frequently used search engine worldwide. But in some countries, its’ alternatives are leading or competing with it to some extent. As of the last quarter of 2023, more than 63 percent of internet users in Russia used Yandex, whereas Google users were nearly 36 percent. Meanwhile, Baidu was the most used search engine in China, despite a strong percentage decrease of internet users in the country accessing it. In other countries, like Japan and Mexico, people tend to use Yahoo along with Google. In the first quarter of 2022 nearly 56 percent of the respondents in Japan said that they had used Yahoo in the past four weeks. In the same year, over 27 percent of users in Mexico said they used Yahoo. Another search engine, Bing, operated by Microsoft, was the second most popular search engine in the United Kingdom after Google.

In January 2025, Google remained by far the most popular search engine in the UK, holding a market share of 93.25 percent across all devices. That month, Bing had a market share of approximately 4.22 percent in second place, followed by Yahoo! with approximately 1.37 percent. The EU vs Google Despite Google’s dominance of the search engine market, maintaining its position at the top has not been a smooth ride. Google’s market share saw a decline in the summer of 2018, plummeting to an all-time-low in July. The search engine experienced a similar dip in June and July 2017. These two low points coincided with the European Commission’s antitrust charges against the company, both of which were unprecedented in the now decade-long duel between both parties. As skepticism towards search engine platforms grows in line with public concern regarding censorship and data privacy, alternative services like Duckduckgo offer users both information protection and unfiltered results. Despite this, it still held less than one percent of the industry’s market share as of June 2021. Perception of fake news in the UK According to a questionnaire conducted in the United Kingdom in 2018, 57.7 percent of respondents had come across inaccurate news on social media at least once before. Rising concerns over fake news, or information which has been manipulated to influence the public has been a hot topic in recent years. The younger generation however, remains skeptical with nearly half of Generation Z claiming to be either unconcerned about fake news, or believed that it did not exist altogether.  

This statistic shows the market share of search engines in the United States in December 2008 to 2020. In December 2020, Verizon Media's search market share was 11.4 percent, down 0.1 percent from the previous year. The subsidiary was formed in 2017 by Verizon Communications as a merge between newly acquired Yahoo! and AOL.

Google is not only popular in its home country but is also the dominant internet search provider in many major online markets, frequently generating almost 80 percent of desktop search traffic. The search engine giant has a market share of over 90 percent in India and accounted for the majority of the global search engine market, ahead of other competitors such as Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Google’s online dominance All roads lead to Rome, or if you are browsing the internet, all roads lead to Google. It is hard to imagine an online experience without the online behemoth, as the company offers a wide range of online products and services that all seamlessly integrate with each other. Google search and advertising are the core products of the company, accounting for the vast majority of the company revenues. When adding this up with the Chrome browser, Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google’s ownership of the Android mobile operating system, and various other consumer and enterprise services, Google is basically a one-stop shop for online needs. Google anti-trust rulings However, Google’s dominance of the search market is not always welcome and is keenly watched by authorities and industry watchdogs – since 2017, the EU commission has fined Google over 8 billion euros in antitrust fines for abusing its monopoly in online advertising. In March 2019, European Commission found that Google violated antitrust regulations by imposing contractual restrictions on third-party websites in order to make them less competitive and fined the company 1.7 billion euros.

Apple and Microsoft command over a 90 percent share of the desktop operating system market in the United Kingdom (UK), as of 2024. Microsoft’s product, Windows, held 68.24 percent of the market, while Apple’s macOS held 23.65 percent. Browsers and search engines used on desktops Desktop searches made up 49 percent of search engine activity as of April 2023, ahead of the 46 percent held by mobile phones. Google is not only the preferred search engine for 86.3 percent of UK desktop users, it is also the developer of Chrome, the preferred browser for 59 percent of internet users in the UK. Share of households with home computers steady The share of households with home computers in the UK has remained steady since 2015-16, with 88 percent of households owning such a machine according to the UK Office for National Statistics. The average weekly retail sales value of computers and telecommunications in the UK amounted to 96.8 million British pounds in October 2023.

In January 2025, Google's mobile search market share in the United Kingdom was 97.55 percent. Despite the search engine remaining with a similar referral share for mobile devices throughout the years, Google's quota on desktop devices in the UK has significantly reduced during the latest analyzed month.

The share of DuckDuckGo in the mobile search market across India was about 0.04 percent in December 2021. This was a drastic fall in the market share from about 0.14 percent in September 2018. DuckDuckGo is a search engine company founded in 2008 that focuses on protecting users' privacy and avoids personalization in search results.

Yandex occupied 71 percent of the Russian desktop search market in 2022. As for mobile search, the company's market share was close to 58 percent. Both in desktop and mobile segments, Yandex's share of visits in Russia increased in recent years. Across all devices, the search engine's market share in Russia amounted to 62.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022.

In January 2024, Bing held a 4.13 percent share of the search market in the United Kingdom (UK) across all devices. Meanwhile, Google held a much larger share of the UK's online search market.

Bing on the world stage  Google holds a similar share of the global desktop search market as it does in the UK. Outside of the UK, Bing attracts an increasing 10.51 percent share of the market. Worldwide, Bing regularly attracts more than 1.3 billion unique monthly visitors.

Google and mobile: an unfair advantage?  Bing held just a 1.4 percent of the mobile search market in the UK in June 2021. Despite being significantly lower than their overall share, this was still good enough to give Bing second place in the market, due to Google’s absolute dominance of mobile search in the UK. According to European regulators, however, the means with which Google achieved their dominance is neither fair nor legal.

In 2019, Google was fined 1.5 billion euros for effectively forcing manufacturers of android-based equipment to bundle Chrome and Google search with their devices, in order to access other Google services. As a result of that ruling, users setting up android devices in Europe from the start of 2020 will be able to choose from a list of available default search providers. The available options of the list will vary country to country, based on a bidding process in which rival search engines indicate to Google exactly how much they would be willing to pay per user selecting their company as the default search provider.

The website that people could least do without in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2019 was Google. The BBC website was second most popular. Amazon saw an increase in popularity compared to 2017, whereas Facebook experienced a considerable drop in popularity.

Search engines in the UK

The most popular website, Google, has by far the highest share of the desktop search engine market in the UK, with Bing being its closest competitor. Google is also the leading mobile search engine, with a market share of 98 percent as of October 2020. These days, the majority of online search in the UK is mobile.

Internet demographics and use in Great Britain

The number of Brits using the internet daily increased continuously between 2006 and 2020, reaching over 46 million individuals in 2020. As of November 2020, the majority said they used the internet for sending and receiving emails. Finding information about goods or services was the second most common activity carried out online. Less than a fifth of internet users said that they went online to make a medical appointment or to use online health services.

In the most recently reported fiscal year, Google's revenue amounted to 348.16 billion U.S. dollars. Google's revenue is largely made up by advertising revenue, which amounted to 264.59 billion U.S. dollars in 2024. As of October 2024, parent company Alphabet ranked first among worldwide internet companies, with a market capitalization of 2,02 billion U.S. dollars. Google’s revenue Founded in 1998, Google is a multinational internet service corporation headquartered in California, United States. Initially conceptualized as a web search engine based on a PageRank algorithm, Google now offers a multitude of desktop, mobile and online products. Google Search remains the company’s core web-based product along with advertising services, communication and publishing tools, development and statistical tools as well as map-related products. Google is also the producer of the mobile operating system Android, Chrome OS, Google TV as well as desktop and mobile applications such as the internet browser Google Chrome or mobile web applications based on pre-existing Google products. Recently, Google has also been developing selected pieces of hardware which ranges from the Nexus series of mobile devices to smart home devices and driverless cars. Due to its immense scale, Google also offers a crisis response service covering disasters, turmoil and emergencies, as well as an open source missing person finder in times of disaster. Despite the vast scope of Google products, the company still collects the majority of its revenue through online advertising on Google Site and Google network websites. Other revenues are generated via product licensing and most recently, digital content and mobile apps via the Google Play Store, a distribution platform for digital content. As of September 2020, some of the highest-grossing Android apps worldwide included mobile games such as Candy Crush Saga, Pokemon Go, and Coin Master.

In 2022, Google generated 224.5billion U.S. dollars in advertising revenue. This figure is expected to further grow to reach nearly 340 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. The search engine is responsible for roughly 38 percent of the global ad revenue.

In 2022, Microsoft generated 12 billion U.S. dollars in advertising revenue. This figure is expected to further grow to reach 16.3 billion U.S. dollars by 2027. The company is responsible for roughly two percent of the global ad revenue.

In 2023, Coc Coc accounted for a share of around 3.7 percent in the browser market in Vietnam. The market share of CocCoc has been declining steadily since 2017.

En enero de 2024, más del 10% de los usuarios de Internet a nivel mundial realizaron sus búsquedas desde su ordenador a través del motor de búsqueda Bing. Por su parte, Google, que ha liderado el mercado durante todo el periodo, era utilizado por casi un 82% de los internautas.