Google Reigns Supreme In 2009 Worldwide Searches But Microsoft Sees Faster Growth

The December 2009 global search stats are out from comScore and unsurprisingly Google took the top spot for total worldwide searches last month, with 87.8 billion searches over Google sites. Google’s searches rose 58 percent from December 2008’s searches, which totaled 55.6 billion searches. Yahoo and Baidu followed Google, with 9.4 billion and 8.5 billion searches, respectively. Google accounted for two-thirds of overall searches in December, which are estimated at 131 billion.

But Microsoft saw the greatest jump in number of queries worldwide for the year, with searches rising 70 percent, from 2.4 billion in December 2008 to 4.1 billion in December 2009. This can be attributed to the launch of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, which is seeing traction. Russian search engine Yandex also grew year over the year, which volume of search queries rising 91 percent to 1.9 billion searches.

Overall search queries in December rose nearly 50 percent from the previous year to 131 billion searches, or 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The U.S. led the pack 22.7 billion searches, representing 17 percent of all searches worldwide. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Russia showed the highest increase in number of search queries in 2009, growing 92 percent to 3.3 billion searches.

Of course, for 2010, the numbers should be interesting considering the whole Google-China brouhaha. Google said in a blog post that it had been subjected to cyber attacks originating from China along with 20 other companies (reportedly including Yahoo), prompting the company to reevaluate the way it conducts business in the country. Google stated it would end self-censorship of its Chinese search engine in China, and that it may end up closing the site and shutting down its China offices. The fact is Google already lost the search engine battle in China to Baidu sometime ago.