"The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide," said Jack Flanagan, Comscore executive vice president, in the report.

The U.S. represents the largest individual search market globally, accounting for 22.7 billion searches or nearly 17 percent of all global searches. China came in second with 13.3 billion searches and Japan was third with 9.2 billion. Russia showed the highest gains, moving up 92 percent to 3.3 billion searches.

Google tops the list of search engines as the most used. The Internet behemoth drug in 87.8 billion individual searches in December, accounting for two-thirds of all searches worldwide. Google's numbers also show a 58 percent increase from 2008. Yahoo pulled in second with 9.4 billion searches, but an underwhelming 14 percent increase in total searches from 2008.

Microsoft was fourth most popular worldwide with 4.1 billion searches, but showed the greatest gains with a shattering increase of 70 percent in 2009.

Are those numbers too good to be true, or could Microsoft actually start to close the massive market share gap between Bing and Google?