India - 1.2 billion searches done in June

Internet and mobile research firm comScore has revealed figures for online search in India. Not surprisingly, it's Google which leads the search market with over one billion searches conducted by Indians on the Internet in June 2008.

Google commands 81 per cent of the search share in the country, while Yahoo! is a remote second with 117 million searches. Other sites on the list include Ask.com with 24 million searches, Microsoft's sites (including Live Search, with 22 million) and Rediff.com (18 million). A total of 1.2 billion searches were conducted in India during June.


Apart from the search engines, there are other sites which are frequently visited and used to conduct searches. Facebook attracted 10 million searches by Indians in June.

The People Group, which owns sites such as Fropper.com, Makaan.com and Shaadi.com, also figured on the list with nine million searches. The other sites are Cnet Networks, Wikipedia and AOL.

“The Indian search market is dominated by global Internet brands, with Google attracting the wide majority of searches. As the top local player in the search market, Indian web portal Rediff.com attracts slightly less than 2 per cent of all searches, indicating that there is substantial room for growth among the local Internet brands,” says Jack Flanagan, executive vice-president, comScore, in an official statement.

The report shows that the frequency of search among Indians is low with 53 searches per searcher, compared to the worldwide average of 92. The number of unique searchers in India was 23.4 million in June.

Flanagan adds, “Though India represents more than 15 per cent of the world’s population, it accounts for less than 2 per cent of global Internet searches. It will be interesting to see if this gap narrows as more people in India gain Internet access and ramp up their use of search over time.”

The data represents Internet users in India over the age of 15 years who surfed from both work and home locations in June 2008.