Can Google now ‘tick off’ the United Kingdom on its list of territories annexed as part of its bid for world domination?

Well possibly, because it seems that it has supplanted Yahoo! as the preferred search partner on the BT Yahoo! homepage.

BT is the UK’s largest ISP, and the most recent available statistics (although you could hardly call them authoritative, dating as they do from 2001), showed that 720 million searches a month were carried out via its site a month for the UK and Ireland. Google already provided the technology behind the search but it wasn’t made obvious to users.

A BT spokesman said: “We are delighted that we are continuing to work with Yahoo! through to 2011. As part of this new agreement BT Yahoo!’s web search will be provided by Google. We made this decision based on the fact that Google is the most popular search engine in the UK.

“The combination of Google’s search engine with Yahoo’s leading content and email services offers customers the ultimate broadband experience.”

The link between BT and Yahoo! goes back to 2003, when they teamed up to jointly market broadband services.

The original story: The Register