According to a recent report by comScore in its first ever study of the worldwide search activity, Google retained its global search crown in August, but some smaller competitors in China and South Korea are giving the company a run for its money in Asia.

On the basis of data gathered for its qSearch 2.0 service, comScore reported on the top 50 worldwide Internet properties that use some form of search. The conclusion: More than 750 million people age 15 and older — or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience — conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher.

“With the tremendous volume of search activity occurring around the world, search continues to present an abundance of marketing opportunities to companies on both a global and local scale,” Bob Ivins, executive vice president of International Markets at comScore, said in a statement.

Google Power vs. China Power

According to the report, Google sites saw 37.1 billion searches in August. Of that total number, Google saw 31 billion searches and YouTube.com saw five billion. By comparison, Yahoo sites garnered 8.5 billion searches.

Whereas in China, a different giant is building up. Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with two billion global searches.

“Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon,” Ivins said. The continued development of search in international markets will undoubtedly present compelling opportunities for savvy marketers on a global scale.”

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The trend / movement online is unstoppable. Clients that we speak to uses Internet more and more for research, validation and building a visually compelling site with well strategised plan for Search Engine Optimization / Marketing is very crucial moving forward.

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan, and India, outperformed the rest of the world with 258 million unique searchers conducting 20.3 billion searches in August. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches.

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“The search distribution across the world and the fact that Asia is a bigger market than Europe and North America is interesting,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “It suggests that there is enormous revenue growth potential in those markets versus the United States, where most of the revenue is currently concentrated.”

Changing Ad Buying Behavior

For anybody that is skeptical about the power of search marketing, Sterling said this study demonstrates the global phenomenon. It’s not a passing fad, Sterling argued. In fact, he said he expects brand advertisers to shift more of their ad budgets online in the coming years.

Click the following link to find out more information on the shifting of the online advertising landscape.

On choosing Drupal… Harvard Science site recently went through a revamp and decided to go with Drupal platform for the development.

Here is a little excerpt on the process:

Choosing a CMS
During the six months before I began building the HarvardScience site, the Harvard News Office had been working with designer Claudio luís Vera of Studio Module. The result was 28 beautiful templates, which had been chiseled, filed, and polished to the client’s adoration. Unfortunately, during this time the News Office had still not made up its mind about what CMS to use. In fact there was still some muttering about how a custom CMS was the way to go.

So approximately six months ago, I built the first draft of HarvardScience using Drupal over the course of a weekend. The result was exactly what I had hoped for - the news office was so excited by the speed at which the site could be built they decided to go with Drupal. The rapid development of a prototype or draft site can be built using Drupal made the CMS issue a fait accompli strategy.

The sIFR Drama
My first draft of the site did not use any of the mark-up, styles, or sIFR that the designer had provided. I instead created my own custom theme, relying heavily on blocks and views. I had assumed that if the site looked very close to the original design and that the CMS was in place, everyone would be happy. This was a huge error on my part. The designer had been working with the client for nearly six months at this point, and everyone had become wed to the “Whitney” font used heavily throughout the site. So despite a devious experiment on my part proving that the client couldn’t tell which page used sIFR and which did not, I was asked to go back and add Whitney into the site.

Thus began draft number two. I installed the sIFR module Jeff Robbins and began to add in the style I had originally left out. The module itself is super easy to use. Sadly I didn’t find sIFR2 so lovely. Regardless how much I fiddled with font-size, letter-spaceing, padding, margins, height, and width, I could not get consistently sized sIFR text replacement. I was informed by the designer that if I moved to sIFR3, which was still in beta at the time, all my problems would go away. In short, at the end of this draft, everyone was pretty frustrated - most of all me.

Thus began draft number three. This time I did what I should have done to begin with. (What is that saying about hindsight?) First I threw out the theme I had built. Next I grabbed the directory the designer had used to store all his stylesheets, flash, javascript, and images to run his 28 templates, and stuck it at the root of my drupal install.

Next I copied the mark-up from one of designer’s templates, and named it page.tpl.php. Then piece by piece, I replaced the static content with nodes, views, and blocks - themeing as I went - ensuring that Drupal spit out the exact same mark-up as the original template. So after a very long journey through the land of sIFR, the site emerged as the designer originally intended.