New data published by comScore reports that 61 billion searches were conducted worldwide in August this year, with no surprise that Google dominates the share of this search market with 37.1 billion searches conducted through this engine (broken down into 31 billion main search actions and 5 billion going through YouTube).

Yahoo! owned sites ranked second, with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com - the Chinese language search engine - was placed third with more than 3.2 billion searches. Just outside the top 3 were Microsoft sites (2.2 billion searches), and Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide.

The survey also reported on the number of unique searchers by region and the average number of searches conducted per person. The 61 billion searches were shown to be made by 754 million searchers, equating to just under 81 searchers per person, on average. The Asia-Pacific region takes the largest share here (with the large markets of China, Japan and India) with 258 million unique searchers conducting 20.3 billion searches. Europe comes second with 210 million searchers and 18 billion searches, followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. Latin America demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August.

These fascinating results are from the first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity, based on data from comScore's qSearch 2.0 service, taking data from the top 50 worldwide Internet properties where search activity is observed. The figure of more than 750 million people aged 15 and older who conducted searchers in the month represented 95% of the worldwide Internet audience.