Search engines: Market distribution monthly in the United Kingdom (UK) 2015-2020

According to monthly figures gathered by a web traffic analysis tool from January 2015 to June 2020, Google is by far the most popular search engine in the UK. In June 2020, Bing had a market share of approximately 9.7 percent in second place, followed by Yahoo! with approximately 2.2 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 January 2020.

Perception of fake news in the UK

According to a questionnaire conducted in the United Kingdom in 2019, 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.