The leading Internet marketing research company, ComScore released figures of the top 10 search engines for 2009 on January 24, 2010. Worldwide, there were 131 billion searches conducted globally in December 2009, a 46% growth over the same time last year. Two Chinese major search engines, Baidu.com and Alibaba.com, are included in the list.

 

   Alibaba

 

Hong Kong-listed Alibaba.com handled 1.1 billion searches with a minor decrease of 1%. It is a business-to-business unit in Alibaba Group that includes business-to-business international trade, online retail and payment platforms and data-centric cloud computing services.

 

   Ask

 

The Ask search engine grew 43% to 1.5 billion searches. The engine allows the users to get answers to the questions people ask and people can use traditional keyword search to find information they want. The results are what really make Ask.com to stand out. The super-clean interface rivals with the other major search engines and the search options are as good as Google.

 

    Facebook

 

The social-networking site Facebook handled 1.6 billion searches with a 43% growth rate. It is the most popular for uploading photos, with 50 billion pictures uploaded.

 

   Yandex

 

Russian search engine Yandex is the fastest growing search engines among the top 10. It grew 91% to 1.9 billion searches.

 

   NHN

 

NHN's Naver search engine ranked sixth at 2 billion searches with a 9% growth rate. It is a popular search engine headquartered in South Korea with branches in Japan, China and the United States.