According to a recent report by comScore in its first ever study of the worldwide search activity, Google retained its global search crown in August, but some smaller competitors in China and South Korea are giving the company a run for its money in Asia.

On the basis of data gathered for its qSearch 2.0 service, comScore reported on the top 50 worldwide Internet properties that use some form of search. The conclusion: More than 750 million people age 15 and older -- or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience -- conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher.

"With the tremendous volume of search activity occurring around the world, search continues to present an abundance of marketing opportunities to companies on both a global and local scale," Bob Ivins, executive vice president of International Markets at comScore, said in a statement.

Google Power vs. China Power

According to the report, Google sites saw 37.1 billion searches in August. Of that total number, Google saw 31 billion searches and YouTube.com saw five billion. By comparison, Yahoo sites garnered 8.5 billion searches.

Whereas in China, a different giant is building up. Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea's NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with two billion global searches.

"Seeing Asian search engines like China's Baidu.com and Korea's NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon," Ivins said. The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale."

Search Engine Advertisement

The trend / movement online is unstoppable. Clients that we speak to uses Internet more and more for research, validation and building a visually compelling site with well strategised plan for Search Engine Optimization / Marketing is very crucial moving forward.

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan, and India, outperformed the rest of the world with 258 million unique searchers conducting 20.3 billion searches in August. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches.

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"The search distribution across the world and the fact that Asia is a bigger market than Europe and North America is interesting," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. "It suggests that there is enormous revenue growth potential in those markets versus the United States, where most of the revenue is currently concentrated."

Changing Ad Buying Behavior

For anybody that is skeptical about the power of search marketing, Sterling said this study demonstrates the global phenomenon. It's not a passing fad, Sterling argued. In fact, he said he expects brand advertisers to shift more of their ad budgets online in the coming years.

Click the following link to find out more information on the shifting of the online advertising landscape.

With Google’s USD$3.1 billion buyout of online advertisement company DoubleClick and Microsoft’s recent USD$6 billion acquisition of digital
marketing company aQuantive, the world of online advertising is dramatically
shifting into high gear.

Both companies are moving rapidly into each others’ turf. Google, being a leader in the online search engine and advertising industry has in recent years, develop and acquire applications to bundle with its services (Google Maps, Picasa…) Microsoft, on the other hand has been a leader in building the entire computer industry around its Windows ecosystem and in recent years, moved a great amount of resources and acquisition to the online search and advertising market dominated by Google and Yahoo. Prior to aQuantive, Microsoft bought a company called Massive Inc for its expertise to insert advertisement into video games. Disruptive forces is happening in the software industry – where a shift away from desktop applications and toward applications / services delivered over the internet.

Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect of Microsoft has made it clear the importance of Microsoft focus on ‘Software Plus Service’ paradigm in the recent press conference held. And more recently, they announced that Microsoft Works, a trimmed down version of their office application suite will be provided for free, with ads supported.

From a personal point of view, Microsoft has not been the most innovative company in recent years to be the first to come out with applications / services but if you look at their history of acquisition and focus, you have to be very afraid when they do expand into a different industry all together. Microsoft has the tenacity and flexibility to adjust and align itself to new markets dominated by others and through play safe approach (letting others test and try out the market), and seeing the potential growth of the new market, Microsoft with its billions in cash reserves will make the second / third move. (remember Netscape in the 90s)

Google's dominance has come primarily from its prowess at making money from ads placed next to Web search results. Google snagged nearly half of all Web searches performed in the United States in June while Yahoo grabbed about 25 percent and 13 percent were on Microsoft's search sites, according to audience-measurement company comScore.

Some analysts see the search-ads market starting to stagnate and believe Microsoft's bid for aQuantive, indicates a looming shift in online advertising.

The early online search-ads have really propelled Google's growth for the past four years and is starting to slow down… according to Gartner Inc. The next wave of growth is going to be big brands shifting their advertising budgets, still largely invested in newspapers and TV, into the Internet.

For a team like Ad.WRIGHT, the shift to online advertisement market is a bonus for us as we aligned ourselves with the bigger players and focus on the technology / partners to provide a complete platform for clients to design, development and extend their online revenue stream through online ads well placed.

Ad.WRIGHT is constantly aligning itself with the market forces / trends and we are confident with our experiences gained over the last 6-7 years of web development, we can be a leader in the online advertising space, providing the creativity, tools for tracking and execution that will tie well with our clients marketing objectives.