I was a prompted to post this after a question from a fellow SEO this morning [Off topic: SEOs the world over talk to each other and share things]- they wanted to know if there are any stats on Google.com usage in the UK.

It is an interesting subject, given that a user in the UK can opt between 3 different English language versions of an engine from Google:
US Engine: www.google.com
UK Engine: www.google.co.uk “The web”
UK Engine: www.google.co.uk “Pages from the UK”
(I’m excluding www.google.ie only because Eire is geographically separate from the UK)

Bearing in mind that Google .com is a US engine there are still plenty of UK website owners, targeting UK audiences, who are concerned about ranking in it. I can *sort of* see their point because notionally the .com is an easily available engine choice in the UK. You can get to it from the Google UK homepage:

…however Google doesn’t really want that to happen. If you’re a UK site you belong in the UK SERPs, not the ones for the US- you probably wouldn’t care about appearing in China (.cn) or Finland (.fi), so why get het up about the US?

The other issue is the “not knowing”; people might want to rank in .com because they perceive that UK searchers use it as much as .co.uk. This is where the Hitwise data comes up trumps:

This indicates that UK searchers use UK search engines, only 4% use Google .com, and nearly 90% use .co.uk- result! What this can’t tell us is the split between the .co.uk “The web” and “Pages from the UK” versions- I’ll save that for another time.