MOSCOW, January 25 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's most popular Internet search resource, Yandex, has become one of the world's Top 10 search engines, according to a report by ComScore, a leading Internet market research company.

According to figures published by the company on Thursday for December 2007, Yandex ranked ninth, with 566 million searches, or 0.9 % of the world's search requests.

The planet's most popular search engine remained Google, which handled 41,345 billion searches, or 62.4 % of search requests, in the same period. Yahoo! ranked second with 12.8 %.

A total of 66.2 billion search queries were conducted worldwide in December 2007.

The director of the Yandex press service, Mikhail Yshakov, claimed that the company's share of the search market was actually higher, saying that, "According to our estimates, the number of search queries in December last year totaled 587 million."

Yandex announced profits of $72.6 million for 2006, a more than 50% increase, year-on-year.