According to the latest statistics forwarded by comScore, the year 2009 witnessed a 46 percent growth of the global search market, with over 131 billion searches reported in the month of December alone.

The search market-share tally was led by the Internet search biggie Google – with a 58 percent year-on-year rise, the search engine boasted nearly 87.81 billion searches, marking almost two-thirds of the total searches for the year.

Yahoo was a distant second-ranker for the year, with its 9.44 billion searches indicating a 13 percent increase from its year before figures. While the Chinese search engine Baidu ranked third, with a 7 percent increase to 8.53 billion searches; Microsoft Bing ranked fourth with 4.09 billion searches.

The top ranker among social networks was Facebook.com, which showed a 54 percent year-on-year search growth.

In terms of search markets, the biggest was the US, which witnessed 22.74 billion searches during the year, comprising 17 percent of the searches in the world. China ranked secong among individual search markets with 13.27 billion searches, while Japan was third with 9.17 billion searches.

Commenting on the search-related statistics for 2009, comScore Inc. Executive VP Jack Flanagan, noted: “Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks.”