Google Handles 115 Billion Searches a Month

This chart shows the number of searches handled by search engines worldwide in December 2012.

In December 2012, more than 175 billion online searches were conducted worldwide. That is 65,000 searches per second, of which 65 percent were handled by market leader Google. According to recent comScore data, the U.S. search giant handled an overwhelming 115 billion searches in December, distancing its strongest competitor Baidu by more than 100 billion searches.

8.2 percent of global searches were conducted on Baidu in December thanks to the company’s strong position in China. Yahoo surprisingly claimed the third rank, with 4.9 percent of all searches conducted on Yahoo’s sites. It should be noted that Yahoo’s search is powered by Microsoft’s Bing search engine, but comScore tracks the site on which a search is conducted rather than the underlying search engine. With 2.8 percent of searches, Microsoft lost the fourth place in the ranking to Russian competitor Yandex, who handled 2.8 percent of all searches.