Worldwide Search Market Grew 46% in 2009, Bing Boost Microsoft
According to recent figures released by comScore, more than 131 billion searches were conducted by users around the globe in December, marking a huge year-over-year increase. The Russian Federation in particular saw enormous gains in the number of searches conducted during the year.
In December, nearly 131.4 billion searches were conducted by worldwide users, marking a 46 percent increase from the 89.7 billion searches conducted in the same month in 2008.
Users in the U.S. conducted 22.7 billion queries in December, up 22 percent from the 18.7 billion searches conducted in December 2008. China followed behind with 13.3 billion searches conducted in December, marking a 13 percent year-over-year increase from 11.8 billion searches.
Japan was third with 9.2 billion queries, marking a 48 percent year-over-year increase from 6.2 billion. The U.K. was fourth with 6.2 billion searches in December, up 35 percent from the 4.6 billion searches conducted in December 2008.
Germany was fifth with 5.6 billion queries, up 38 percent from 4.1 billion in December of the previous year, while France was sixth with 5.4 billion searches, up 61 percent from 3.4 billion queries in the same month in 2008.
South Korea followed behind with 4.0 billion searches, up 44 percent, while Brazil finished December with 3.8 billion queries, up 53 percent. Canada was ninth with 3.7 billion searches in December, up 28 percent.
The Russian Federation rounded out the top 10 list with 3.3 billion queries, up 92 percent from 1.7 billion queries conducted in December 2008.
Google handled 87.8 billion worldwide searches in December, up 58 percent from the 55.6 billion queries it took care of in December 2008, according to comScore. Yahoo! was second with 9.4 billion worldwide queries, up 13 percent from 8.4 billion in the same month in the previous year.
China’s Baidu.com was third with 8.5 billion searches in December, up 7 percent year-over-year.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was fourth in the worldwide search rankings in December, finishing the month with 4.1 billion worldwide searches, up 70 percent from 2.4 billion queries in December 2008, “on the strength of its successful introduction of new search engine Bing,” comScore notes in a press release.
eBay was fifth with 2.1 billion searches, followed by NHN Corporation with 2.1 billion searches in December. Yandex, a Russian search engine, followed with 1.9 billion searches, up a whopping 91 percent from 992 million in December 2008.
Facebook (1.6 billion), Ask Network (1.5 billion) and Alibaba.com (1.1 billion) rounded out the list of the top 10 worldwide search properties.
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