According to the most recent worldwide statistics revealed by market researcher comScore, Google has retained its top spot as the world's most popular search engine; and is, by far ahead of its competitors!

The comScore data shows that, with 76.7 billion searches, Google grabbed 67.5 percent of the market share to remain in the first place; followed by Yahoo at a rather distant second place with 8.9 billion queries and 7.8 percent share. In the third place was China's Baidu, with nearly 8 billion queries; while Microsoft and eBay were in the fourth and fifth places, with 3.3 billion and 1.7 billion queries respectively.

As per comScore, the overall queries showed a 41 percent year-on-year increase, with over 113 billion searches conducted in July this year. Incidentally, Russia's Yandex search engine grew its queries more Google - with nearly 1.3 billion queries, Yandex showed a whopping 94 percent increase in number of queries over its previous-year figures!

The notable jump in the number of global search queries clearly highlights Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comments on financial earnings calls. Schmidt has been trying to convey to financial analysts that the recession-plagued consumers conduct more Web searches to look for bargains.

The data revealed that the highest number of searches, 32.1 percent, were conducted in Europe; followed by 30.8 percent in Asia Pacific; and 22.1 percent in North America.