Google strengthens grip on global search

Google has strengthened its grip on online search, accounting for more than two-thirds of the worldwide total of 113-billion online queries in July.

Research by market analyst comScore gave Google a 67.5% share of the global total with 76.7 billion searches compared with 48.7 billion in the same month last year. Close to one-third of searches originated in Europe.

Google’s year-on-year growth of 58% outpaced the 41% rise in the overall search market.

Yahoo! came second with 8.9 billion searches and a market share of 7.8%. Its volumes grew by just 2% over the year. Microsoft saw volume growth of 41%, lifting it to fourth place with 3.3 billion searches. Chinese search engine Baidu was in third with 7.97 billion searches.

The fastest growing business in the top ten was Russian search engine Yandex, which increased volume by 94% to 1.3 billion.

ComScore included Facebook and eBay in its search-market overview. More than 1.7 billion searches were carried out on eBay July – a 41% increase year on year. Facebook saw growth of 18% in search queries to 879 million.

Europe was the source of 36.4 billion searches, 32.1% of the total, with the Asia-Pacific region not far behind on 30.8%. North America provided 22.1%.

However, Latin America appears to produce the most-intense search users both in frequency and volume. ComScore recorded 13 “search-usage days per user” and an average number of searches per user of 130. Europe came in at 11.8 search-usage days per user, with an average searches per user of 116.9.