— Despite Bing Search Default, Internet Explorer Users Still “Google” >50% of the Time —

The now ubiquitous phrase “Google it” certainly points to a clear king of the search engine marketplace, but many prefer to do their “Googling” in a variety of browsers to take advantage of certain plugins, privacy features, and other attributes. With this in mind, Chitika Insights looked to measure whether the Web browser a person uses has any impact on the search engine they use.

To quantify this study, Chitika Insights took a sample composed of hundreds of millions of ad impressions from within the Chitika Ad network; ranging from August 14th to August 20th, 2012. Focusing on impressions with search engine referrals, a user agent analysis was then conducted on this sample of data to determine the browser in use. A table depicting the results of this study can be seen below:

As expected, Google is the go-to search engine for users across all browsers. Even on Internet Explorer, where the default engine is Bing, Google accounts for more than half of all search engine traffic. Overall, Yahoo is the second most popular engine, directing a distant 12.3% of search engine traffic compared to Google’s 74.7%. These figures highlight the consistency of Google’s dominance, but also the impact of default search engines within browsers. While still over 50%, Internet Explorer users exhibit the lowest rate of Google usage and utilize Bing at rates more than four times that of Firefox, the next closest browser in regards to Bing search share.

Despite the fact that more than one in four searches is performed using platforms other than Google, about 75% of all search queries come through the largest search engine. Additionally, unlike Bing usage, Google’s presence is largely consistent across all browsers, and hence, different types of users. This emphasizes the importance of Google search for marketers and publishers.

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