Most Internet Searchers Originate in APAC

By Greg McNevin

October 15, 2007: According to a new report released on Friday, Google unsurprisingly commands the lion’s share of online searches, snatching more than half of all search requests worldwide in August. However, when it comes to APAC its competitors are snatching an increasingly large share of the lucrative market.

Conducted by comScore, the global survey found that out of the 61 billion queries plus searches conducted by over 750 million internet users in August, Google searches snared more than 37 billion.

A hefty result indeed, particularly considering Google’s share accounts for more than all of its competitors combined. When broken down to a regional level, however, Google’s command of the market looks less assured, particularly in China and South Korea where it is facing increasingly strong challengers.

Overall, Yahoo! lagged into second place with 8.5 billion searches, while Beijing’s Baidu.com snapped up third with over 3.2 billion. Microsoft Live search took out a distant third (compared to Google and Yahoo!) with 2.1 billion searches, while Korea's Naver.com bit it’s ankles in fifth place and 2 billion searches.

The monthly survey now goes beyond pure web searches, however, including data from the top 50 worldwide Internet sites where searches are performed, including Amazon.com and eBay.com. Due to this, Google received a big boost to its search tally thanks to its acquisition of YouTube.com, which added 5 billion searches.

The biggest news to come out of the survey is not Google’s dominance, but rather Microsoft’s loss to China’s Baidu.com, and the fact that most searches were conducted in Asia-Pacific. Here 258 million uses submitted 20.3 billion searchers compared to Europe’s 210 million users knocking out 18 billion searches and North America’s 206 million conducting 16 billion searches.

As this is the first month of the new survey the results, while interesting, are not as powerful as they could be. Subsequent months will enable more accuracy and trends to be mapped out, however, as for now the results illustrate that while Google is well and away the king of worldwide search, it’s not without potent competitors in what is fast becoming the most important regions.

Comment on this story