The global search market grew a sizeable 46 percent between December 2008 and December 2009, from 89.7 billion to 131.4 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations. These searches include the top properties where search activity is observed, not only the core search engines. Google of course took first place, but Microsoft managed to see the biggest percentage change, at least when looking at the top five search properties. When you represent the data visually, though, a larger percentage change isn't so formidable:
Google sites grabbed 87.8 billion searches (66.8 percent of the global market) last month, showing a 58 percent increase in search query volume over the past year. Yahoo sites meanwhile ranked second globally, with 9.4 billion searches (7.2 percent), a growth of 13 percent. Chinese search engine Baidu saw 8.5 billion searches (6.5 percent), a growth of 7 percent. Microsoft sites managed to take 4.1 billion searches (3.1 percent), a growth of 70 percent, thanks to the successful introduction of Bing in June 2009. eBay took fifth place with 2.1 billion searches (1.6 percent), a solid gain of 58 percent.
When breaking down the searches by country, the US represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches (17.3 percent of searches conducted globally). Despite the fact that China has a larger Internet population, it ranked second with 13.3 billion searches (10.1 percent), followed by Japan with 9.2 billion (7.0 percent), the UK with 6.2 billion (4.8 percent), and Germany with 5.6 billion (4.3 percent).
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