Research carried out by Searchmetrics has found that Amazon is at the top of the pile in terms of appearing on Google’s results pages in the UK for terms related to consumer electronics, according to Internet Retailing.

Interestingly enough, analysts also found that video streaming service YouTube was the second most prominent site to appear for this type of search, suggesting that this is due to consumers also wanting to see footage of products before they order them online.

Traditional bricks and mortar retailers Argos and Currys managed to enter the top five, although the fact that they were both behind Amazon and YouTube in terms of results page dominance shows that there has been a real shift in consumer loyalty in recent years.

The study also looked into the extent to which shoppers were using search engines to simply find out information about products that are on their radar rather than actively intending to make a purchase. Consumers are split down the middle on this issue, meaning that half the time the searches are simply conducted out of curiosity.

Experts claim that just a fifth of site visits generated by search engines come about because shoppers are looking for product information. This means that plenty of people use Google to get details on specific items but ultimately find that there is no need to click through to retail sites.

Another aspect covered by the study is that there is an even divide between the number of sites which have .com web addresses and those which have .co.uk in their URLs in the top ten results for consumer electronics on Google. The top five is dominated by .co.uk, so there is obviously more trust from British shoppers for sites which use this top-level domain name.