ComScore Incorporated, a Global Internet Information Provider, has released the latest figures looking at the most popular search engines worldwide. It is no surprise that Google tops the list. Googles has approximately five times as many searches as competitor Yahoo!, which also no no surprise.
 
Interesting is only the fact that one non-US based search engines,  Baidu, executes more search requests in the Asian-Pacific region than Microsoft. Maybe some of you remeber that Google tried to push Baidu away from their top position in Asia, but failed. Until today Baidu is the search engine of choice in China and leaves Google far behind. The stats also show that the Asian-Pacific region has the  most searchers and searches happening. This is the global top ten of search engines:

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

Current players in Japan are Yahoo, Google and MSN. Yahoo and Google had a combined market share of 90% in december 2006. Baidu was interested in entering the market for a very long time. In march this year they opened Baidu Japan, which is - by the way - blocked in China. Baidu rules because they truly understand the Chinese user but in Japan they are having a hard time, although they are on the rise.
 
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