2009, the year that went by in a flash and left us with some good memories and an economy that nearly crumbled, and left hundreds and thousands of people homeless and unemployed. However, it was also the year, when the search industry witnessed an exponential surge in the number of searches made on the web. As per the results released by comScore, users from age 15 and above made more than 131 billion searches in the month of December alone, putting an estimate of 29 million searches a minute.

The United States of America, led the search revolution for the year 2009 with more than 22.7 billion searches, which amounts to 17% of the total searches made worldwide. China and Japan came second and third with 13.3 billion searches and 9.2 billion respectively. As expected,the king of search, Google topped the list of search engines as its grabbed the biggest slice of the search pie with 87.8 billion individual searches for the month of December 2009.

Microsoft’s Bing search service could not even come close to Google, but the introduction of Bing has definitely done some good Microsoft, as the search engine achieved a gain of 70% in the last year.

Ac cording to Jack Flanagan (Executive V.P, comScore),

“The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide.”

Via PC World