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Internet users turning to Facebook, eBay and Amazon for web searches

Google is still the king of search for US and UK consumers but the way consumers search on the internet is changing rapidly.

The latest statistics from comScore, detailed in its "Digital Future in Focus" reports for the US and the UK, show that in both countries, Google is still the go-to website for search. In the UK it accounts for 91% of search traffic, beating Bing into a very distant second place. In the US, Google's sites generate 191.3 million unique visits and Google is the destination for two of every three searches made online, giving it a 66.7% share of the market, with Microsoft's Bing again pushed into second place with a 16.3% share.

However, what the figures also reveal is that although search continues to drive internet, the way consumers are searching is beginning to evolve. Whereas in times past a search term would simply be typed into Google, today, consumers are using different sites for different search information.

Facebook may have only recently launched its Graph search function, but its members have been using it as a social search engine for some time. "Consumers are increasingly likely to search for a product on Amazon or eBay, and search for people on Facebook or Whitepages.com," comScore notes in the report. "While core searches are softening, vertical searches are up 8% year-over-year."

ComScore's figures show that UK internet users spend 6.5 of their total 37 monthly hours online on social media sites while in the US, which has the highest average monthly internet usage figures of any country in the world, 10.8% of the average 42.8 hours spent surfing the net every month are devoted to Facebook alone.