Google does 61% of all searches

Google Inc., the most popular Internet search engine, handled more than four times as many of the world’s queries as its closest rival Yahoo! Inc. in August, research firm ComScore Inc. said last week.

Google accounted for 61 percent of global search queries, while Yahoo had 14 percent, ComScore said. China’s Baidu.com Inc. was third with 5 percent, followed by Microsoft Corp. with 4 percent.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are expanding outside the United States to reach international users and bolster advertising sales. About 48 percent of Google’s $3.87 billion in sales last quarter came from abroad, up from 42 percent a year earlier.

More than 750 million people age 15 and older used search engines in August, making 61 billion searches, or almost 81 queries per person, ComScore said.

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The study was the first by ComScore to include statistics from around the world. In the United States, Google handled 57 percent of queries in August, ComScore said last month. Yahoo accounted for 23 percent, while Microsoft had 11 percent, ComScore said.

Also last week, Google announced that it has upgraded software that lets business customers look for internal files and documents.

The search software gives employees of Google’s 10,000 business customers the same ability to scour corporate databases as consumers have when searching the Web, said Matthew Glotzbach, a product manager for the company.

Google is bolstering its Web software for businesses in a bid to take customers from Microsoft and earn revenue from sources other than advertisers, which account for 99 percent of sales. Google first introduced the business search software five years ago and counts ConocoPhillips, Cisco Systems Inc. and Apple Inc. among its customers. •

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