Google sites in India had more than 1 billion searches conducted in June, representing 81 percent of the market. Yahoo sites ranked a distant second with 117 million searches accounting for 9.4 percent. Ask Network landed in the third spot with 24 million searches representing 1.9 percent of the market.

Microsoft sites trailed Ask grabbing 22 million searches and accounting for 1.7 percent of the market. Indian Internet portal Rediff.com was ranked fifth with 18 million searches accounting for 1.5 percent.

"The Indian search market is dominated by global Internet brands, with Google attracting the wide majority of searches," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president.

"As the top local player in the search market, Indian web portal Rediff.com attracts slightly less than 2 percent of all searches, indicating that there is substantial room for growth among the local Internet brands."

India is one the most rapidly emerging Internet markets in the world in terms of overall usage growth, but the country has less frequent search behavior than its global counterparts. Of the 37 countries individually reported by comScore, India ranked second to last with 53 searches per user during the month, below the global average of 93.

"Though India represents more than 15 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for less than 2 percent of global Internet searches," said Flanagan. "It will be interesting to see if this gap narrows as more people in India gain Internet access and ramp up their use of search over time."
 

Google, Yahoo Interest In Rediff Dismissed

One must always consider a cardinal truth about companies and acquisitions: corporate types lie through their teeth about such deals until the ink dries on the contracts and everyone has signed on the dotted line.

A growing class of Internet users in India drives the popularity of native web services, like the Rediff portal. Just as major online players from the US have entered China to compete with native services, or build local ones, India attracted similar attention.

The potential for one of the big online giants to make a sweeping statement in Mumbai and beyond picked up plenty of attention. A Hindustan Times claimed Yahoo or Google could be eyeing Rediff for a takeover.

If rumors are true, Rediff has been negotiating a deal with one or both companies. However, Rediff may be in the penumbra of India-related rumors. A report at ContentSutra said a Rediff spokesperon denied the report as baseless.

Those rumors have been fueled by speculation in Barron’s, citing an analyst discussing general interest from Google and Yahoo in India web properties.

Rediff could be in for a rough morning anyway. ContentSutra, citing Barron’s again, said both Rediff and another portal, Sify, have been trading at multiples that far outstrip the ad market in India.

One might think if Rediff takes a big hit from investors on NASDAQ once the market opens, they could be a takeover target.

To clear up one thing – the matter of language barriers – Rediff is an Indian company (more on that in a minute), but everything on the corporate-run side of iShare is in English.  To address a second question – what, exactly, does iShare do? – a prominent sentence on the site itself explains, “Share your videos, photos and music with friends.”

So now we know why people would use iShare, and who can use it.  As for who will use it . . . this may become very big in India.  The Business Standard, contentSutra, The Hindu, Tech2, TechShout, and TechTree have all written about iShare’s launch, and all of these sites and publications are based in India.

On the other hand, “American” sources are lacking, and the only other coverage I could find was from Softpedia, a useful Romanian site.  So it looks like Orkut may indeed have a serious challenger on its hands, but YouTube doesn’t have to sweat (at least in America, and least not yet).

Still, even in India, iShare has a ways to go; it had 15 or fewer results for “hindi,” “manali,” and “zeest,” which are all tags provided by the site’s home page.