UK surfers .co.uk engines or .com?

What is the split?

[mancunian]

Does anybody know what proportion of UK general public surfers use to surf the net

ie Google.co.uk vs Google.com
MSN.co.uk vs MSN.com
Yahoo.co.uk vs Yahoo.com
Askjeeves.co.uk vs Askjeeves.com

Never mind us techhy experts I am just intereted in "the man in the street".

[Lord Majestic]

ie Google.co.uk vs Google.com

Can't mind others but as far as Google is concerned the split on a big UK B2C site was about 50-50, with .com being slightly more popular. Given geo-targeting I don't think it fundamentally matters as results on google.co.uk seem to be the same (for me) as on google.com.

[IanTurner]

I see about 70-30 in favour of the .com versions.

[irishaff]

Is it not the case that if you are in the UK and type in google.com you get sent automatically to .co.uk?

Are adwords that i am aiming towards the UK showing in the version of google.com that uk visitors will see.. if that makes sense.

ta
David

[engine]

Is it not the case that if you are in the UK and type in google.com you get sent automatically to .co.uk?

Not correct, thankfully. :) AV did that and it was very annoying.

[tigger]

just checked the stats and from one site yesterday

.com 51.67%
.co.uk 15.38%

[mancunian]

Thanks for all the replies.

However I think the only time you can rely on your logs/stats to answer this question is if you have a .co.uk AND are hosted with a UK ip address.

Otherwise your own site will be biased to appearing more in .com engines rather than .co.uk ones.

My own gut feel is that a few years ago Google.com and Yahoo.com etc were more heavily used in the UK but now I think it is very much the .co.uk engines being used in the UK as the internet has developed and people want more releveant searches and joe public now knows not all websites end in .com

Does anybody have any realiable stats?

[Gernwax]

Doesn't google.com show you uk based replies if you are from a UK IP address?

[creative craig]

No it doesn't, if you use google.co.uk and tick pages from the UK then you should get UK results.

[dougie]

Interesting thread - I'm just trying to come to a decision on this myself.

All of my customers come from the UK, my hosts are in the UK and I have the .com and .co.uk versions of the URL.

I feel that .com's look more professional than .co.uk's, (maybe others feel differently), but if you were me, and, assuming that *your only goal* was to get as high as possible on the SE's that the UK public use, would you go .com or .co.uk?

Any comments?

Sev.

[jetboy_70]

dougie, .co.uk without a doubt, and not just for Google ranking reasons.

For a big UK travel site, with UK hosting and a .co.uk domain, 60% of Google traffic is from google.co.uk, 35% from google.com, and 5% from other Googles.

Obviously, rankings are higher in Google UK for UK specific searches, so that's going to give my figures a heavy bias. I'm not tracking what proportion of the Google UK traffic is using the UK specific search, although this could easily be done by matching something like 'cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB' on the referral string.

[Macro]

For a .co.uk site over the last few months and a sample size of almost six figure number of referrals

3.2% .ca
45% .co.uk
51% .com

Others are google.co.in etc.

The site is hosted in the UK