As reported by Chitika Insights, Google has maintained its place as the leader in Search Engine Market Share for several years now. However, just like any product or service, Google’s position is highly dependent on many factors, including location. In order to determine how Google’s popularity in the search engine market changes outside of the US, we analyzed a sample of search engine traffic from three key countries within our extensive ad network (United States, Canada and United Kingdom) to see how search engine preference differs.

We found that Google becomes even more popular outside of the U.S. as seen in our graph below:

While these differences are striking, it is consistent with data previously released by Experian Hitwise , which indicate a very strong position for Google in the United Kingdom. While Experian Hitwise found a 90.84% market share, we indicate a similar, but slightly lower figure of about 89.57% as seen on our network. Canada is also a stronghold for Google, where over 85% of search engine traffic in the Chitika network from Canada originates from the market leader. Google in the USA “lags behind” in that regard, where just over three-fourths of search engine traffic originates from Google.

As an equally striking way to illustrate the difference between the countries, Microsoft-powered search sees a far larger presence in the United States. Specifically, a US based user is almost two and half times more likely to use Bing/Yahoo than one based in the United Kingdom, and over 50% more likely than a user in Canada:

Clearly, while Microsoft has ramped up and eaten into Google’s share of the market in the United States, it has a way to go in pushing Bing and Yahoo outside of the country. For website owners, optimization outside of Google becomes less important if one is looking to get more non-American users. For Bing and Yahoo, however, there is still plenty of room available for growth. Will Microsoft eventually gain outside of the United States? Check back with Chitika Insights in the future for more updates.

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