Global search market grew by leaps and bounds in 2009

If you're wondering why Google and Microsoft are engaged in a death struggle over search, you need look no further than the global search numbers for last year. comScore [1], an organization that tracks this type of information, reports phenomenal search growth across the world. When you consider that searches translate into ads, which translate into dollars it's no wonder that Microsoft wants a bigger piece of this global pie. Unfortunately for them, it's Google's world and the rest of the search engines just play there. (View data on the top 10 search properties [2])

Some wild eyed numbers

Consider some of these numbers from comScore's research:

Search grew by 46 percent worldwide in 2009.
This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 2.9 million per minute.
The United States ranked first in worldwide searches with 22 billion followed by China with 13 billion. (View geographic data on searches [3])

No surprise: Google number one with a bullet

It should surprise absolutely no one that Google owns the lion's share of this market with over 66.8 percent of the total global search market. It is no wonder that Steve Ballmer had to admit that his company's search engine, while a nice side project for Microsoft, cannot hope to compete (as I wrote on my DaniWeb blog in "Ballmer's Right: Google Owns Search [4]"), but Microsoft spent a lot of money last year launching Bing and it paid some dividends. The report puts Microsoft as the fastest growing of the web search properties growing 70 percent to 4.1 billion searches. Of course, when you compare that to Google, which garnered of 87.8 billion searches, it puts things in perspective. And when you stop to consider that 4 billion searches represented just one day's search across the entire world, these two players aren't really in the same league.

Google dominates the worldwide search market to such a huge degree, that Yahoo! sites, which came in second with just over 9.4 billion searches, were an astonishing 78 billion or so searches behind Google. Think about those numbers for a second and it's no wonder the entire world is so threatened by Google's growing dominance. And even while Google dabbles in its other hobbies including broadband, social media, energy, health records, cell phones and more, search remains the company's bread and butter, for it is through the search engine that Google continues to generate the greatest percentage of its income.

Follow the money

What the report doesn't say is what this all means in terms of income. I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing that for each billion searches, there is an X factor of income involved. Anyone who has a website knows there is a critical mass, a tipping point if you will, where it all comes together. You suddenly can expect a certain number of hits per post, a certain number of click throughs and comments and so forth. The same logic has to apply to ads. With more people visiting, the more likely you are to get more clicks, and the greater the income; and if the ads are based on eyeballs, then you can just imagine what kind of rates Google would get compared to its closest rival some 78 billion searches behind. It's probably not going to get the same kind of money for ads.

When you see these numbers laid out so starkly, it helps you understand the commercial search engine market in no uncertain terms: It's Google and the rest of the pack. comScore's numbers bring a stark clarity to the state of today's market. Google has virtually no competition and Microsoft and others currently represent almost no threat to them. - Ron [5]