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.  

1. Environmental volunteering can benefit participants and nature through improving physical and mental wellbeing while encouraging environmental stewardship. To enhance achievement of these outcomes, conservation organisations need to reach different groups of people to increase participation in environmental volunteering. This paper explores what engages communities searching online for environmental volunteering.
   

2. We conducted a literature review of 1032 papers to determine key factors fostering participation by existing volunteers in environmental projects. We found the most important factor was to tailor projects to the motivations of participants. Also important were: promoting projects to people with relevant interests; meeting the perceived benefits of volunteers and removing barriers to participation.
   

3. We then assessed the composition and factors fostering participation of the NatureVolunteers’s online community (n = 2216) of potential environmental volunteers and compared findings with those from the literature review. We asked whether projects advertised by conservation organisations meet motivations and interests of this online community.
   

4. Using Facebook insights and Google Analytics we found that the online community were on average younger than extant communities observed in studies of environmental volunteering. Their motivations were also different as they were more interested in physical activity and using skills and less in social factors. They also exhibited preference for projects which are outdoor based, and which offer close contact with wildlife. Finally, we found that the online community showed a stronger preference for habitat improvement projects over those involving species-survey based citizen science.
   

5. Our results demonstrate mis-matches between what our online community are looking for and what is advertised by conservation organisations. The online community are looking for projects which are more solitary, more physically active and more accessible by organised transport. We discuss how our results may be used by conservation organisations to better engage with more people searching for environmental volunteering opportunities online.
   

6. We conclude that there is a pool of young people attracted to environmental volunteering projects whose interests are different to those of current volunteers. If conservation organisations can develop projects that meet these interests, they can engage larger and more diverse communities in nature volunteering.
   

Methods The data set consists of separate sheets for each set of results presented in the paper. Each sheet contains the full data, summary descriptive statistics analysis and graphs presented in the paper. The method for collection and processing of the dataset in each sheet is as follows:

The data set for results presented in Figure 1 in the paper - Sheet: "Literature"

We conducted a review of literature on improving participation within nature conservation projects. This enabled us to determine what the most important factors were for participating in environmental projects, the composition of the populations sampled and the methods by which data were collected. The search terms used were (Environment* OR nature OR conservation) AND (Volunteer* OR “citizen science”) AND (Recruit* OR participat* OR retain* OR interest*). We reviewed all articles identified in the Web of Science database and the first 50 articles sorted for relevance in Google Scholar on the 22nd October 2019. Articles were first reviewed by title, secondly by abstract and thirdly by full text. They were retained or excluded according to criteria agreed by the authors of this paper. These criteria were as follows - that the paper topic was volunteering in the environment, including citizen science, community-based projects and conservation abroad, and included the study of factors which could improve participation in projects. Papers were excluded for topics irrelevant to this study, the most frequent being the outcomes of volunteering for participants (such as behavioural change and knowledge gain), improving citizen science data and the usefulness of citizen science data. The remaining final set of selected papers was then read to extract information on the factors influencing participation, the population sampled and the data collection methods. In total 1032 papers were reviewed of which 31 comprised the final selected set read in full. Four factors were identified in these papers which improve volunteer recruitment and retention. These were: tailoring projects to the motivations of participants, promoting projects to people with relevant hobbies and interests, meeting the perceived benefits of volunteers and removing barriers to participation.

The data set for results presented in Figure 2 and Figure 3 in the paper - Sheet "Demographics"

To determine if the motivations and interests expressed by volunteers in literature were representative of wider society, NatureVolunteers was exhibited at three UK public engagement events during May and June 2019; Hullabaloo Festival (Isle of Wight), The Great Wildlife Exploration (Bournemouth) and Festival of Nature (Bristol). This allowed us to engage with people who may not have ordinarily considered volunteering and encourage people to use the website. A combination of surveys and semi-structured interviews were used to collect information from the public regarding demographics and volunteering. In line with our ethics approval, no personal data were collected that could identify individuals and all participants gave informed consent for their anonymous information to be used for research purposes. The semi-structured interviews consisted of conducting the survey in a conversation with the respondent, rather than the respondent filling in the questionnaire privately and responses were recorded immediately by the interviewer. Hullabaloo Festival was a free discovery and exploration event where NatureVolunteers had a small display and surveys available. The Great Wildlife Exploration was a Bioblitz designed to highlight the importance of urban greenspaces where we had a stall with wildlife crafts promoting NatureVolunteers. The Festival of Nature was the UK’s largest nature-based festival in 2019 where we again had wildlife crafts available promoting NatureVolunteers. The surveys conducted at these events sampled a population of people who already expressed an interest in nature and the environment by attending the events and visiting the NatureVolunteers stand. In total 100 completed surveys were received from the events NatureVolunteers exhibited at; 21 from Hullabaloo Festival, 25 from the Great Wildlife Exploration and 54 from the Festival of Nature. At Hullabaloo Festival information on gender was not recorded for all responses and was consequently entered as “unrecorded”.

OVERALL DESCRIPTION OF METHOD DATA COLLECTION FOR ALL OTHER RESULTS (Figures 4-7 and Tables 1-2)

The remaining data were all collected from the NatureVolunteers website. The NatureVolunteers website https://www.naturevolunteers.uk/ was set up in 2018 with funding support from the Higher Education Innovation Fund to expand the range of people accessing nature volunteering opportunities in the UK. It is designed to particularly appeal to people who are new to nature volunteering including young adults wishing to expand their horizons, families looking for ways connect with nature to enhance well-being and older people wishing to share their time and life experiences to help nature. In addition, it was designed to be helpful to professionals working in the countryside & wildlife conservation sectors who wish to enhance their skills through volunteering. As part of the website’s development we created and used an online project database, www.naturevolunteers.uk (hereafter referred to as NatureVolunteers), to assess the needs and interests of our online community. Our research work was granted ethical approval by the Bournemouth University Ethics Committee. The website collects entirely anonymous data on our online community of website users that enables us to evaluate what sort of projects and project attributes most appeal to our online community. Visitors using the website to find projects are informed as part of the guidance on using the search function that this fully anonymous information is collected by the website to enhance and share research understanding of how conservation organisations can tailor their future projects to better match the interests of potential volunteers. Our online community was built up over the 2018-2019 through open advertising of the website nationally through the social media channels of our partner conservation organisations, through a range of public engagement in science events and nature-based festivals across southern England and through our extended network of friends and families, their own social media networks and the NatureVolunteers website’s own social network on Facebook and Twitter. There were 2216 searches for projects on NatureVolunteers from January 1st to October 25th, 2019.

The data set for results presented in Figure 2 and Figure 3 in the paper - Sheet "Demographics"

On the website, users searching for projects were firstly asked to specify their expectations of projects. These expectations encompass the benefits of volunteering by asking whether the project includes social interaction, whether particular skills are required or can be developed, and whether physical activity is involved. The barriers to participation are incorporated by asking whether the project is suitable for families, and whether organised transport is provided. Users were asked to rate the importance of the five project expectations on a Likert scale of 1 to 5 (Not at all = 1, Not really = 2, Neutral = 3, It

A dataset providing information about local council services in Leeds. Leeds City Council uses this information to populate the Knowledge Panels on the Google search website. The dataset includes type of service, contact information and opening times. What is a Knowledge Panel? When people search for a business on Google, they may see information about that business in a box that appears to the right of their search results. The information in the box, called the Knowledge Panel, can help customers discover and contact your business. Is the information correct? If you spot any information which you believe to be incorrect please contact us on webmaster@leeds.gov.uk . We can then investigate this and update this dataset and the Google Knowledge Panel. Automated update This dataset is automatically updated on a fortnightly basis

As global communities responded to COVID-19, we heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps would be helpful as they made critical decisions to combat COVID-19. These Community Mobility Reports aimed to provide insights into what changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports charted movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

According to data from Pi Datametrics, Google UK searches for vacations in Spain increased by roughly 2.3 percent in April 2023 over the same month of the previous year. By contrast, Google UK searches for holidays in the United States and Canada declined by around four percent over the same period.

Data generated from a randomized English-language data scrape of Google Play Store between February and April 2013 using nature-related search words. This returned .36,304 apps that were manually reviewed by two people working together to remove nonn-nature-related apps - semantic complexity precluded fully-automated pruning. Through this process, 6301 apps were identified as nature themed. These were then assigned to one or more of six major use categories following an interactive process of automated keyword classification and manual review

Throughout the second semester of 2021, "nails" was the most searched beauty-related keyword on Google in the United Kingdom (UK), based on total search volume through Google UK. According to the data, during this period, "nails" had a total number of over 366 thousand searches. "nail designs" attracted another 300 thousand searches each on Google UK.

According to a January 2021 survey of adults worldwide, 66 percent of total respondents agreed on feeling that tech companies hold too much control over their personal data, while only six percent expressed disagreement with the statement. Consumers based in Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States reported higher levels of concern over data control, with more than seven in ten people feeling that tech companies have too much control over their personal information. While surveyed consumers in Sweden, China, and Indonesia appeared to agree the least with the statement, still more than five in ten reported feeling that tech companies have too much control over their data.

Questionable ethics and security breaches put tech companies under scrutiny

Tech giants, and big tech in particular have been under focus in recent years when it comes to data privacy and consumer-related ethics. While Google has been recipient of not one, but a number of antitrust fines from the EU dating back to 2017, tech giant Yahoo fell victim to various data breaches that resulted in the exposure of 3 billion consumer records in total to date.

User skepticism is growing

No wonder public trust has faltered. The rise of ad-blockers, VPNs and privacy search engines show that consumers are more eager than ever to protect their data online. In the United States, alternative search engine DuckDuckGo saw a surge in popularity from April 2020 - around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, over half of those surveyed in the UK said that the public exposure of recent data breaches had impacted their willingness to share personal information. The global pandemic has also hit the tech industry, with companies in the tourism sector taking the biggest blow. Booking.com laid off the highest number of employees during 2020, a total of 4375 members of staff.