Even as the globe searches through Google, at a rate of 1.4 million queries per second, its vaunted leadership hasn’t been enough to shunt aside competitors in China or Korea.
Google Tops The World
Over the two and a half years I’ve been writing at Murdok, all I’ve seen Google do is continue to rise in global search. I could have written this article in April 2005 or today, and all that would change is the timestamp.
Give comScore credit for the latest bit of Google good news. Google grabs the bulk of global search.
But not all of it. ComScore’s qSearch 2.0 service said the estimates for global query numbers lined up this way for the top five search providers in August 2007:
Google, 37 billion queries
Yahoo, 8 billion queries
Baidu, 3.3 billion queries
Microsoft, 2.2 billion queries
NHN, 2 billion queries
Baidu serves as Google’s big competitor for the Chinese market. China’s rapidly growing Internet userbase has enticed companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft there, to the point where the companies ignore complaints about the government-mandated censorship they adhere to with search results.
In Korea, a powerful infrastructure of true broadband service, unlike the dearly-priced minimal service US broadband providers dole out in meager bits, contributes to that country’s affinity for tech services. An AP report on comScore’s figures cited a Korean preference for human interaction over software as the key to NHN’s success in search.
Even though Google may be less successful when it comes to the Chinese and Korean markets, it hasn’t stopped them from growing in wealth and dominance elsewhere. They may have to settle for second-best in Asia, and that isn’t going to make their billions in search ad revenue any less impressive.
