comScore released findings this week from a study of the online habits of Portuguese Internet users. Interestingly, they found that the Portuguese Internet audience grew to nearly 4 Million users in September.

Over 3.8 million people age 15 and older accessed the Internet from a home or work location in Portugal in September, viewing an average 1,843 pages and spending an average 1.9 hours online per person during the month.

The latest comScore report concerning the search market has arrived, and although it may not cause too many jaws to drop, there are some interesting tidbits contained within.  It seems that Google hit its stride again in October, and Bing continued to make some impressive gains.

Internet users in the Asia-Pacific region conducted a record 38.6 billion searches in September, with searchers averaging nearly 88 queries per person, according to a new report from comScore.

Google sites ranked as the top search destination with nearly 17 billion searches on its sites during the month, representing a 44.1 percent share of all searches in the region. Baidu landed in the second spot with 8.2 billion searches (21.3% share), while Yahoo sites ranked third with 5.3 billion searches (13.8% share).

Touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S. showed a significant 159 percent growth rate during the past year to 23.8 million users, according to a new report from comScore.

The growth in touchscreen device adoption outpaced the already strong 63 percent growth in U.S. adoption of smartphones.

Online video viewing reached another record in September, driven largely by TV season premieres, according to the latest report from comScore.

More than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month. Nearly 26 billion videos were viewed in September, as Google sites accounted for more than 40 percent of videos viewed online by Americans.

Google sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video property in September with nearly 10.5 billion videos viewed. YouTube accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed at Google properties.

Social networking sites in the U.K. accounted for 13.8 billion display ad impressions in August 2009, representing more than 25 percent of all display ads viewed online, according to a new study by comScore.

Telecommunications companies were the heaviest social networking site advertisers, serving more than 949 million display ad impressions on social networks in August, or about 7 percent of all display ads delivered in the site category.

comScore has released the results of a study on locally targeted online display ads in the US, which focused on four major markets: Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. In these areas, the results indicate that about 10% of all display ads are locally targeted.

"Locally targeted ads are an increasingly important component of the digital ad landscape because they represent a more efficient allocation of ad dollars," said comScore vice president Brian Jurutka. Here’s a look at some additional numbers:

This week comScore has released the latest numbers regarding video viewed online and I am still scratching my head. According to the findings (remember class, repeat after me – “It’s research and research ain’t perfect”) in August of 2009 there were just over 25 billion videos viewed by the approximately 161 million US Internet users. That works out to be an average of 157 videos viewed per user during that time period.

In August, online video reached a record high, with over 25 billion videos watched during the month, according to data from comScore. A pretty good chunk of these were watched via Google sites (hardly surprising, considering the enormous popularity of YouTube). Google sites accounted for over 10 billion videos watched in August.

comScore Media Metrix released its top 50 web properties list for August this week, and found that educational sites and humor sites were quite popular for the month. Home sites also saw some significant gains.

The monthly comScore, Hitwise, and Nielsen reports concerning search market share are sometimes predictable to the point that it’s almost possible to write about them ahead of time: "Google does well.  Everything else, not so much."  comScore found that Bing managed to beat the competition in August, however. 

It seems that getting itself acquired by Adobe isn’t enough to keep the web analytics giant Omniture busy.