US success story Google is officially the most popular internet search engine in the world, AFP news agency reports.According to the results of a comScore study, the search engine dealt with 37.1 billion of a total 61 billion searches conducted around the globe in August.
The majority of these were made with Google itself; however, five billion of them were conducted at its video-sharing site YouTube.
Internet rival Yahoo! came second in the popularity stakes, according to the study, processing 8.5 billion search queries during the month.
Also competing with California-based Google were Chinese search engine Baidu, which was the third most popular - handling 2.2 million searches - and South Korean company Naver, which came fifth.
Baidu is China's pre-eminent search property and recent comScore findings suggested that over the last year the firm has increased its market share in the country, while Google has slipped back.
According to comScore, while Baidu accounted for 69.5 per cent of the Chinese market over the past 12 months, representing a rise of 7.6 per cent, Google accounted for 23 per cent, showing a fall of 1.1 per cent.
Commenting on the global figures, comScore vice president of international markets Bob Ivins said: "Seeing Asian search engines like China's Baidu.com ... ranked alongside Google and Yahoo! underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon.
"The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale."
