There is a growing number of people who are claiming that search engines, in their current form, are obsolete and that their fate is sealed. People will start relying more and more on the information from their friends and extended social graph, on places like Facebook or Twitter, and search as we know it will become largely irrelevant. There is some truth in these claims, people will rely more on their friends for certain answers but search engines aren't going anywhere and if the current trends continue, they'll play an increasingly bigger part of our lives online.

ComScore has released its analysis of the global search market for December 2009 and the numbers are hard to argue with, the search market grew by a whooping 46 percent from the previous year. 131 billion searches were conducted worldwide last December, up 89 billion for the same month in the previous year.

Ranked by country, the US sits on top with 22.7 billion searches in December, a 22 percent increase from the 18.6 billion made in 2008. China is the second largest market with 13.2 billion searches up just 13 percent from December 2008. No surprise then that Google's decision to stop censoring results in the country, which will likely lead to it leaving the market altogether, is making such a commotion. Interestingly, with China's self-reported growth in Internet use, the search market trails far behind the rising number of people online in the state.

Japan comes in at third place with 9.1 billion queries in December, a healthy 48 percent increase from last year. In the top ten, Russia saw the biggest rise in searches jumping 92 percent to 3.3 billion queries.

Google takes the lion's share of the global search market with 87.8 billion searches, 67 percent of the market, growing 58 percent since last year. Yahoo comes in second place with a paltry 13 percent increase in search volume reaching 9.4 billion queries. Microsoft Sites come in a rather distant fourth place but saw one of the biggest growths in the top ten with search volume rising 70 percent since 2008.