The latest findings on a study conducted on the amount of search activity in the Asia-Pacific region showed that there were a total of 38.6 billion searches conducted in the region in September 2009, an increase of 33 percent from last year.

Using data from its qSearch service, Google sites topped the chart, which recorded nearly 17 billion searches performed on its site during the month. This accounted for a large share of 44.1 percent out of the total amount of searches in the region.

Baidu.com Inc., another major search destination which saw a total of 8.2 billion searches came in second with a 21.3 percent share. This was followed by Yahoo! Sites which secured the third position with 5.3 billion searches at 13.8 percent share.

On the average, each searcher in the region conducted nearly 88 searches during the month of September. NHN Corporation, the owner of Naver.com saw the largest frequency of almost 81 searches per person. Next were Google Sites and Lycos Sites with the average of 59 and 51 search queries per person respectively.

The study also revealed various search brand preferences across markets. One of the major preferred search brand was Google Sites, which topped as the search market share leader in six of the markets including Australia, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore. Yahoo! Sites did well by capturing the majority share of searches in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

*Excludes visitation from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
Source: comScore qSearch