A recent study from comscore’s global top 10 search engines has revealed a surprising result with Baidu.com, a major player in China, coming in at third ahead of MSN. Might not be that surprising for some since China does have 1 billion people. Google has been struggling to dominate the Chinese market and with Microsoft attempting to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, search engine marketing could make another revolutionary change particularly in SEO and PPC.

*Stats are taken from Comscore.

* Stats from internet world stats.

These statistics can be useful guidelines as to how you approach each market if you are running an international site. One country I suspect may come into play in the next couple of years is India. They have the second largest population behind China and from what I can see, many of them are actually quite skilled and hardworking on many outsourcing sites like rentacoder.com and freelance.com. Keep a close eye on them. Just my opinion but I think that’s where the next biggest trend will be found.