Global search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46% increase in the past year, according to a report from research firm comScore.
Google sites ranked the top search property with 87.8 billion searches in December, accounting for 66.8% search market. Google Sites achieved a 58% increase in search query volume over the past year. Yahoo Sites grabbed the second spot with 9.4 billion searches, Chinese search engine Baidu stood third with 8.5 billion searches (up by 7%).
Microsoft Sites saw the greatest gains among the top five properties, growing 70% to 4.1 billion searches, due to the introduction of new search engine Bing. Russian search engine Yandex grew 91% to 1.9 billion searches.
According to the report, Ask Network search increased 43% to 1.5 billion while Alibaba.com queries were 1.5 billion, a decrease of 1% compared to December 2008. ebay search queries increased by 58% to 2.1 billion from 1.3 billion in December 2008. Social networking site Facebook has reported a 54% increase in search queries to 1.57 billion in December, compared to one billion search queries in the same period of 2008.
Geographically, the US represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or approximately 17% of searches conducted globally. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the UK with 6.2 billion. Among the top ten global search markets, Russia posted the highest gains in 2009, growing 92% to 3.3 billion, followed by France with 61% increase to 5.4 billion and Brazil with an increase of 53% to 3.8 billion.
Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore, said: “The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide. Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks.”
