For anyone who thinks China is a superpower in only the political arena, they are missing the larger geopolitical picture. The Internet is the 21st Century’s newest battlefield where countries will fight for dominance over other nations. As content and data-mining transitions from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, or from Social Media to the Semantic Web, most thought leaders are betting on China as the front-runner in leading this charge.
ComScore, Inc, a leader in measuring the digital world, just released a study on growth in the global search market for 2009 and showed that searches have grown 46% globally. The study revealed that the U.S. remains the largest search market worldwide, while Google retains a commanding lead in the worldwide search market. The U.S. grew 22% from December 2008 to December 2009, with 22.7 billion searches, while China followed with 13.3 billion searches, but only grew 13% year over year.
The total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute.