Leading search engines in the UK 2015-2024, by market share

In January 2024, Google remained by far the most popular search engine in the UK, holding a market share of 93.51 percent across all devices. That month, Bing had a market share of approximately 4.13 percent in second place, followed by Yahoo! with approximately 1.3 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.