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According to figures announced by online competitive intelligence service Hitwise, this represents a 12 per cent increase compared to May 2007.

Meanwhile, Yahoo! accounted for just 4.09 per cent of UK searches, while MSN and Ask represented just 3.72 per cent and 3.07 per cent of the overall market respectively.

Google's progress has been a little slower in the US, where the company's share grew from 65.1 per cent to 68.3 per cent from May 2007 to May 2008. However, until Microsoft or Yahoo! put drastic changes into place, analysts predict that Google's share of the market will only continue to rise.

According to Hitwise, search engines continue to be the primary way for internet surfers to navigate. Travel, news and media, entertainment, business and finance, sports, online video and social networking websites all showed double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines over the year ending May 2008.