Google Hits One Billion Unique Visits In a Month

BogenDorpher writes "According to statistics from ComScore, for the first time ever, a website drew one billion visitors worldwide in just one month. Guess what website came out on top? Google of course. Microsoft and Facebook rounded out the top three. From the article: 'Though Google captured the most visitors last month, users collectively spent the most time at Facebook--250 billion minutes in May, compared with 200 billion minutes at Google and 204 billion at Microsoft."

Comments

Re:Doing what?

[milbournosphere]

Updates perhaps? They don't say whether they counted phone-home updates in this study or not.

Microsoft?

[Mabbo]

What, exactly, are people *doing* at Microsoft's website that would take 204 Billion minutes?

Re:Microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Filling Bug Reports

Re:Microsoft?

[_merlin]

MSDN developer documentation and admin reference. People do write Windows software and administer all those systems, you know.

That's a billion people

[blair1q]

Took me a second.

They don't mean a billion clicks.

They mean a billion different people. One seventh of the world's population followed any of Google's URI's at some point during the month.

Fuck.

Re:That's a billion people

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked in the field, and "unique" doesn't mean what normal people think it means. As on the net, you can't really identify if it's the same person. All you can tell, is if it's the same IP or the same cookie.
As you can imagine, that can be way different from unique people.

Plus, most companies keep this a big secret, but they also count their own employees' visits.
Some even run bots ramping up requests from their employees' home computers by the thousands, to boost their parts of the site in the weekly meeting's presentation. Often for the sake of job safety.
I've seen it more than once, and nobody seemed to mind. We never told our visitor counting service provider.

And to break the camel's back, they also forget about old visitors after a time. At which point they are counted again.

Somebody could easily just have a new log file every week, but count visitors over the month. At which point nobody checks for duplicates in the week files.

Re:That's a billion people

[wvmarle]

Yes it's a lot of people visiting Google. Some may be double counted of course, many more will be missed due to shared Internet connections. If at home my wife and I use the Internet at the same time, we share a single connection, and with that IP address. I wonder whether they count that as one or as two unique visits.

On the other hand, one billion unique visitors to Google isn't that surprising, considering there are currently almost than 2.1 billion Internet users according to this site. How accurate this number is, that's hard for me to judge, though it does sound plausible.

Finding stuff on the Internet means you need help from a search engine. To me there are two core uses of the Internet: one is communication (e-mail, IM, forums), the other is finding information. And for the second one (which includes finding music, videos, etc) one needs help from a search engine. And Google is by far the most popular search engine around, overall. Some countries have local search engines that are more popular, worldwide Google has a market share of something like 80-90% - the sites that give search engine market shares do not exactly agree, except for Google having a near-monopoly on search nowadays.

So to put it all in perspective: it seems that about half the Internet users in this world uses Google at least once every month. A far from shocking number, you may even call it on the low side considering how important search engines are for being able to find information on this vast network.

Re:250 billion minutes wasted

[c0lo]

That goodness we have pope like you to judge the value of other peoples time.

You're no different the people who try to dictate what should be allowed on TV, which websites should not be allowed, and what god to follow.

A matter of personal opinion is trying to dictate? Suggestion: go have a nap, let me waste in peace some time and bandwidth ... on /.

What are the numbers for /.?

[c0lo]

Just made me curious: how many visitors/minutes on /.?

Re:What are the numbers for /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like about 600k visitors per day, or 416 visitors per minute: https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning/site_profile?hl=en#siteDetails?identifier=slashdot.org&lp=true

Re:Doing what?

[Calos]

Have you ever tried using any Microsoft websites to find answers to... anything? It's all advertising. God help you if you have a technical query.

Such a headache. I can believe that someone could spend equal or more time there.

I just don't even bother any more.

Re:Microsoft?

[elpostino]

I am there just about everyday on Technet, reading through knowledge base articles, or downloading software / patches. It is almost always a Google search that has gotten me to that particular Microsoft page ;)

Re:Google The Facebook

[suso]

Because this is a story about the Internet, which runs on Facebook.

Re:Google The Facebook

[ScrewMaster]

Because this is a story about the Internet, which runs on Facebook.

That's news to me. I thought AOL was the Internet ... and a whole lot more.

Re:250 billion minutes wasted

[ScrewMaster]

That goodness we have pope like you to judge the value of other peoples time.

You're no different the people who try to dictate what should be allowed on TV, which websites should not be allowed, and what god to follow.

A matter of personal opinion is trying to dictate? Suggestion: go have a nap, let me waste in peace some time and bandwidth ... on /.

I agree. Now if you'd said, "Facebook should be made illegal" that would be different. I'd still agree with you, but that would be somewhat dictatorial.

The breakdown

[damn_registrars]

250 billion minutes were wasted playing absurd games

200 billion minutes were used searching for information and pictures on Anthony Weiner

205 billion minutes were used downloading the latest version of the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Re:Microsoft?

[BitZtream]

People don't spend massive amounts of time just google searching ... or bing searching ... the do however spend lots of time reading their email on the sites both of those providers provide.

Re:Like they'd know...

[grcumb]

I'm responsible for all KINDS of different searches from over 20 IP's...

Oops, we stand corrected: Make that 999,999,981 unique visitors.

Of course, we kind of fudged the underage we got from the countless Internet cafés worldwide, then jiggled things a bit to cope with laptops and tablets in Starbucks and airports... oh - we did catch that two month period when you were leeching off your neighbour's wifi. And we tried to tell the difference between the times when you accessed the web via your Kindle, your XBox and your Android phone, because you know, at this level of accuracy, mere statistical analysis isn't going to cut it....

So... thanks a bunch for clearing that up. Our numbers just wouldn't be the same without the benefit of your little anecdote....

Oh, wait - yes they would.

sincerely,
ComScore