A lot has changed since our last blog on the market share statistics in the search engine and social media industries. Twitter yesterday reached 50 million tweets a day, Facebook is just getting bigger and bigger and Bing is fast making and impression on the search engine market. Let’s take a look at some of the stats courtesy of Hitwise.

Search Engines:

First of all, let’s take a look at the UK search engine ranking report and compare it to last year’s report:

As you can see in the above search engine comparison, Bing didn’t even feature in the April 2009 report and now they are 3^rd behind Google. The Bing search engine most likely wont be ever be able to take on Google’s search engine, not in the foreseeable future anyway, but they certainly are making their presence felt. Yahoo on the other hand have dropped down one position even though they have remained steady as far as market share goes. Ask have dropped out of the top 5.

Where do you like to hang out online? Do you like the (relatively) clean lines of Facebook or the busy-ness of MySpace, the professionalism of LinkedIn or the casualness of Twitter? Are you aware that your choice of social network is indicative of your social status? Apparently, the invisible castes that delineate the social classes in the real world also apply online.

Nielson Claritas recently conducted a study on the demographics four different social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter) and found that affluent, highly educated people congregate on Facebook, while less affluent, less educated people favour MySpace.

According to the study, nearly 23% of the people on Facebook earn more than $100,000 per year; nearly 42% earn more than $75,000. 37% of MySpace users earn less than $50,000, while only 28% of Facebook users fit into this salary bracket.

Everybody in the computer/internet industry has different preferences regarding what sites to visit, which search engine to use and what social network is the best for advertising business. Search engines and social media sites have been competing with each other for years now, and 2009 is sure to be exciting with millions more people getting in on the internet action, especially with sites like Twitter hitting the scene. I would like to cover which sites are the real big boys and which ones have still got a long way to go.