Google loses some of its share of the Search Engine 'market' (buy YouTube, which it owns is still second)

While Google continues to dominate the search engine market, its leading rivals made up ground in March.

According to the latest data published by Experian Hitwise, Google accounted for 69.97 per cent of all internet searches made across the United States in March.

And though search engine optimisation firms are likely to take note of this ongoing dominance, at the same time the statistics also show that both Bing and Yahoo's own search function boosted their market share recently.

Indeed, the Microsoft application, which was only made available for search engine optimisation providers just a few months ago, increased its market share "in some verticals", the report notes, while Yahoo search benefited from a three per cent increase in overall usage.

Towards the end of last month, Bing, which has already seen its iPhone app downloaded one million times, launched its own Facebook page in the UK in a bid to boost brand recognition and eat into Google's dominance of the British search engine market.