Growth in Internet Search Market - How many searches do you think were conducted during the month of December, 2009? 20 billion? 80 billion? Try 131 billion or, to put it another way, 4bn searches per day, 175 million per hour or 29 million every minute. The total represents 89 billion more searches than were carried out in December, 2008 - a rise of 49%.
In the U.S. alone 22.7 billion were conducted in December, 2009, accounting for about 17% of all searches worldwide, followed by China (13.3 billion), Japan (9.2 billion) and the U.K. (6.2 billion). The country with the highest gain in that month was Russia, increasing 92% to 3.3 billion searches.
As usual, Google reigned with 87.8 billion searches originating from its network of sites, representing 67% of the market, a growth of 58% on December, 2009. Yahoo registered 9.4 billion search queries (up 13%) after which came Microsoft with 4.1 billion. However, Microsoft sites experienced one of the largest growth rates in the top ten with search volume rising 70% in the year to December, 2009, no doubt partly due to the success of Bing.
"The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide" said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president.
"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. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem".