Web News

2010 A Promising Year for Internet Marketing Search

Internet search had one of its strongest runs last year, having set a record expansion of 46% from December 2008 to December 2009. And if recent figures are any indication, the market is set to grow even more in the next few months.

Reports from comScore, a Virginia-based marketing research company, show that in the past month alone, over 131 billion Web searches were performed by people over age 15 both from home and from work.

Of these, 22.7 billion, or about 17% of the total number of searches, were conducted in the U.S. This makes the country the largest individual search market, a title it has held for most of the past twenty years.

China came in a close second, accounting for 13.3 billion or 10% of global search activity. Japan took third place with a bit over 9 billion searches, followed by the UK, Germany, France, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, and the Russian Federation.

Among the major search engines, Google unsurprisingly kept its lead with 87.8 billion searches, a share of over 66%. Yahoo! came in second with 9.4 billion, followed by Baidu, a Chinese search engine, which took in an impressive 8.5 searches.

Microsoft, despite numerous improvements to its Bing search engine and a 70% growth from a year ago, had to settle for fourth with only 4.09 billion searches. The company has several projects slated for 2010, designed to help popularize its search function.

Experts also note that traffic to social networks has increased steadily in comparison to search engines, and may even surpass the latter in some areas. Most agree that the search engine market has ample room to grow, and will certainly do so in 2010.