Google provided 87.8 billion times Google search results in December 2009, or 66.8 percent of the more than 131 billion searches conducted worldwide. Google’s searches rose 58 percent from December 2008’s searches, which totaled 55.6 billion searches. ComScore reported that Internet users over the age of 15 conducted over 29 million searches per minute in 2009.
That’s good for a 58 percent increase in search query volume over the past year, according to figures released Jan. 22 by researcher comScore. These world-leading totals helped Google rake in a fourth-quarter 2009 profit of $1.97 billion and sales of $4.95 billion.
Yahoo Inc. was a distant second, handling 9.44 billion searches, up 13% on year. Fourth-place Microsoft Corp. scored the biggest gains among top five properties, growing 70% to 4.09 billion on the strength of its launch of bing.com. Chinese search engine Baidu Inc. was third, posting a 7% increase to 8.53 billion searches.
Russian search engine Yandex was the fastest growing property among the top 10 search engine. Yandex registered a 90% gain in 2009. Except for Alibaba.com, every one of the top 10 search engines in comScore’s index registered a growth in the total number of searches conducted on their sites.
The U.S. 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 U.K. with 6.2 billion.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on the call real-time search was “very successful.”