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Oct. 10, 2007 at 7:28pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan

Google Top Worldwide Search Engine; Baidu Beats Microsoft

comScore has released new figures looking at the most popular search engines worldwide. Google tops the list, with nearly five times as many searches as nearest competitor Yahoo. But the worldwide list does focus attention on some non-US based search players like Baidu and NHN, which owns Korea's Naver. It also shows Asia-Pacific as the region with the most searchers and searches happening.

Here's the list, with figures rounded, showing the number of searches that happened in August 2007 on each search network:

1. Google Sites: 37.1 billion (5 billion at YouTube)
2. Yahoo Sites: 8.5 billion
3. Baidu.com: 3.3 billion
4. Microsoft Sites: 2.2 billion
5. NHN Corporation: 2.0 billion
6. eBay:1.3 billion
7. Time Warner Network [AOL]: 1.2 billion
8. Ask Network: 743 million
9. Fox Interactive Media: 683 million
10. Lycos, Inc: 441 million

I find it odd that eBay is included in the list. Yes, people search on eBay, but not in the same "mode" or general purpose that they do at a regular search engine. It makes the list as being one of 50 worldwide properties where "search activity" is observed -- i.e., someone did a search of some type, according to my reading. Also, of Google's 37.1 billion, 5 billion came from eBay.

Also interesting is that Microsoft --which is seen in a war against Google -- again is shown as playing catch-up, not just against Google, but also Yahoo and Chinese search powerhouse Baidu.

Worldwide, there were 61 billion searches. Here's the breakdown by region:

Region	Unique Searchers	Searches	Searches Per Searcher
Asia-Pacific	258 million	20.3 billion	78.7
Europe	210 million	17.8 billion	85.1
North America	206 million	16 billion	77.4
Latin America	50 million	4.8 billion	95.7
Middle East - Africa	31 million	2.1 billion	69.8
Worldwide	754 million	61 billion	80.9

Highlights from the chart:

• Asia-Pacific has both more unique searchers and actual searches happening. Of course, that region also likely has more people overall. Perhaps later I'll do a look at the searchers versus overall population angle.
   
• Latin American searchers do more searches per person than other markets, though no explanation of why is given

Also see a discussion on Techmeme here.

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