More than 750 million people ages 15 or older-about 95% of the worldwide Internet audience-conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, according to comScore Inc.’s first comprehensive study of worldwide search activity. The study excluded traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or from mobile phones or PDAs.

There was an average of more than 80 searches per searcher during the month, according to comScore. In the Asia-Pacific region 258 million unique searchers conducted 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches.

The Latin American region had the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August, comScore says. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region is the most underdeveloped, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (2 billion) and searches per searcher (70).

“With the tremendous volume of search activity occurring around the world, search continues to present an abundance of marketing opportunities to companies on both a global and local scale,” says Bob Ivins, executive vice president of International Markets at comScore.

Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August, with 37.1 billion searches conducted, according to the study. Of that number, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com, the video-sharing site that Google owns. Yahoo sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese-language search engine, was third with more than 3.3 billion searches.

Microsoft sites ranked fourth place worldwide with 2.2 billion and Korea’s NHN Corp., which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches. Rounding out the Top 10 search properties were eBay (1.3 billion), Time Warner Network (1.2 billion), Ask Network (743 million), Fox Interactive Media (683 million), and Lycos Inc. (441 million).

“Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon,” Ivins says.

comScore is a web audience measurement company. The study was based on data from comScore’s qSearch 2.0 service.