According to comScore, Google sites led the region with 39.1 per cent of all searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! With 24 per cent and Baidu.com at 16.7 per cent.

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Although Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites captured the majority of the search share in the region, five of the top ten search properties are local country entities, including China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN Corporation, which has a 5.3 per cent share and which also owns search engine Naver.com. Chinese companies Alibaba.com Corporation, Tencent Inc., and Sohu.com Inc., which host Internet-search functionality although they are not strictly search engines, rounded out the list of key local players.

And more than 82 million Chinese Internet users conducted 6.2 billion total searches in April – an average of 75 searches per searcher.

Interestingly, Japan’s 60 million Internet searchers conducted nearly the same number of searches (6.1 billion) as the 82 million Chinese searchers, a result of the heavier search volume per person in Japan (102.6 searches per searcher). Korea (104 searches per searcher) and Singapore (101 searches per searcher) also exhibited notably heavy search volume per person.

For its part, Australia was not far behind on the list with nearly 98 searches per person.