Over 133 billion searches were conducted on the internet during July 2009, according to new figures from comScore.

This, the research company said, is a 41 per cent year-on-year increase, with sites owned by Google still attracting the majority of users, something that may interest internet marketing consultants.

A total of 76.7 billion searches were made through portals owned by the internet giant - or 67.5 per cent of the market share - followed by Yahoo, which registered 8.9 billion searches worldwide.

Also popular was Chinese search engine Baidu, which took seven per cent of the market, while Yandex - a Russian website - recorded the fastest growth, seeing a 94 per cent jump in search query volume when compared to data from a year ago.

Each user made 103.3 searches over the course of the month, the data revealed, with internet users in Europe accounting for 32.1 per cent of the total number made, followed by those in the Asia Pacific region and North America.

Last week, comScore released statistics showing that 21.4 billion videos were viewed online in the US during July, with 158 million people watching content on the internet in the country during the month.