Google's share of the UK search market has fallen below 90 per cent for the first time in five years, but only by 1.41 per cent.

The Chocolate Factory dipped to 89.33 per cent of the market in October, Experian Hitwise reported, while Microsoft's bing and Ask and Yahoo! sites upped their shares. Bing is up on its previous figure by 0.72 per cent, while Ask gained just 0.13 per cent and Yahoo! was up by 0.5 per cent.

"Clearly, Google still maintains a huge competitive edge over the other search engines in the UK market," Experian said in a statement. "There are 18 times more searches conducted on Google Sites than on all the other search engines combined.

"However, this is encouraging news for Microsoft as bing once again starts to gain some momentum and traction in the UK search market."

Hitwise uses at from a number of internet service providers to track the search habits of around eight million people. ®

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