San Francisco - Google powered more than half of all search requests carried out around the world in August, according to a report released Thursday.
An unidentified employee of Google Inc. works at a cubicle in the China headquarters of Google in Beijing, 26 June 2007. Google's China headquarters has about 300 employees and trying to expand it's presence in the nation's growing internet. China currently has about 144 million internet users but censorship remains an obstacle in the market, say analysts. EPA/MICHAEL REYNOLDS
The global study by internet research firm comScore revealed that more than 61 billion searches were performed by more than 750 million users in the month, with Google accounting for 37 billion searches - more than all the other major search engines combined. However search engines in China and South Korea are challenging the search company in their own countries.
Yahoo was the second most used engine with 8.5 billion searches, while Beijing-based language search engine Baidu.com Inc was third with more than 3.2 billion searches, comScore said. Microsoft's web sites ranked fourth with 2.1 billion searches, and Korea's Naver.com, owned by NHN, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide. Some 5 billion of Google's searches were conducted via its video site YouTube, the study found.
The most searches were conducted in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes China, Japan and India, where 258 million users performed 20.3 billion searches. In Europe, 210 million users performed 18 billion searches and in North America, 206 million users performed 16 billion searches. In the Middle East and Africa, which ranked at the bottom of the pack, 30 million people conducted 2 billion searches, comScore said.
'Seeing Asian search engines like China's Baidu.com and Korea's NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon,' said Bob Ivins, comScore vice president of international markets.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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