Spending on digital advertising will hit almost $171 billion (€158 billion) this year, with search ads accounting for $81.6 billion of the global spend.

The figures from eMarketer show the search market is continuing to grow, with Google remaining top of the list despite a ban in China.

According to the figures, search ads will grow by more than 16 per cent compared with last year, with the entire market growing to $130.58 billion by 2019. That’s a growth of more than 10 per cent year on year.

Within that sector, Google will account for about 55 per cent of the search ad revenues this year, rising almost 16 per cent, while China’s Baidu will increase its share by 34 per cent to almost 9 per cent of the global market. That puts it ahead of Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo, which will have 4.2 per cent and 2.3 per cent of the market respectively.

While Microsoft remains static on its percentage market share, Yahoo is expected to see its share decline slightly, by 0.2 per cent, despite a 6.9 per cent rise in revenue to $1.9 billion.

The report pinpointed both Google’s ban in China and a growth in internet users in the country as reasons for Baidu’s rise in the digital ad market in recent years.

According to eMarketer, search advertising in China will reach almost $15 billion in 2015, a rise of almost 33 per cent compared with 2014 and putting it at 18 per cent of all search advertising worldwide.

Rival Sohu has a much smaller market share – 0.6 per cent globally – but its growth for 2014 was 78.1 per cent.