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Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year (searchengineland.com)

Posted by msmash on from the growing-usage,-curious-minds dept.

Danny Sullivan, reporting for Search Engine Land: How many searches per year happen on Google? After nearly four years, the company has finally released an updated figure today of "trillions" per year. How many trillions, exactly, Google wouldn't say. Consider two trillion the starting point. Google did confirm to Search Engine Land that because it said it handles "trillions" of searches per year worldwide, the figure could be safely assumed to be two trillion or above. Is it more than two trillion? Google could be doing five trillion searches per year. Or 10 trillion. Or 100 trillion. Or presumably up to 999 trillion, because if it were 1,000 trillion, you'd expect Google would announce that it does a quadrillion searches per year.

31 comments

  1. Yes but by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can it run Crysis?

  2. Whenever.... by johnsmithperson123 · · Score: 1

    I hear "X served" I automatically assume "X+1" is the real number.

    1. Re:Whenever.... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      It's better than that: plural means non-1. 0.78 million is "millions", 1.2 trillion is "trillions", etc. For purposes of reasonable discussion, it's occasionally useful to raise large fractions to plural, such as to talk about 85,000 people as "Thousands" and then reference 850,000 people as "millions". There is even a standard convention that being within a certain deviation (as wide as half) of an order-of-magnitude is in that magnitude (e.g. >0.5 million is "millions"), mainly to support the usefulness of qualification of magnitude (i.e. 0.999 millions is more "millions" than "thousands", you git).

      In political debate, you often get an integrity check on that, either because you specified "millions" where the difference between 10 million and 0.8 million matters (you're a dick) or because your opponent has no useful argument and wants to poison the well by accusing you of overstating 0.8 million (he's a dick). This is a *huge* opportunity when there's a reasonable response that doubles as an emotional appeal, such as citing 0.8 million homeless Americans in a stream of magnitudes (parallel construction: don't say "thousands of ... billions of ... hundreds of thousands of ... nearly a million ..."; keep to the same form) and having your opponent claim it's *only* 800,000.

      In marketing, it lets you handwave vagaries.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
  3. are people really searching by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I wonder how much of that is just "nascar wiki" searches, where the searcher knows it will open wikipedias nascar page. Or using google as calculator or dictionary. I don't think these should count as searches.

    1. Re:are people really searching by friedmud · · Score: 1

      Why not? It's still hitting Google's infrastructure. Just because the outcome is somewhat "known" that doesn't mean it's any easier for Google...

    2. Re:are people really searching by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      It should be easier. These things most likely get heavily cached.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:are people really searching by lgw · · Score: 1

      Regardless of the search, thats ~63,420 hits per second, which is a large web service for sure. When you remember that all the search results are customized to keep each user in a pleasant bubble of comfortable results, with advertising served based on not just your search terms, but your age, sex, race, and income, that's certainly impressive.

      Sure the calculator built into the search box is less work, but few people use that. Everyone who uses Google just to get a link to the site name they typed into the search still gets customized results with customized advertising.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  4. Almost one search per person/day by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

    2T/7B/365=0.78

    1. Re:Almost one search per person/day by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I wonder how many automated searches take place? For instance I know someone who generates a few hundred thousand per day.

  5. Redundancy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Abundant quantities available.

  6. Easier to search than to save by XXongo · · Score: 2

    Makes sense to me. I no longer bother to bookmark pages I want to refer to later; it's easier to just google search them than it is to find them in my own bookmarks.

    1. Re:Easier to search than to save by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      it's easier to just google search them than it is to find them in my own bookmarks.

      Speak for yourself; I find it's easier to store bookmarks under the phrase or term *I'm* most to want to search for them under in six months when I've forgotten all but the vaguest detail about them, then have Firefox only match that against pages *I've* bookmarked, rather than having Google display countless pages where I can't remember which- if any- of them were the one I was after.

  7. another search, another... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    piece of data analyzed and stored with every other bit of data they have on you.

  8. Trillion by BlackPignouf · · Score: 1

    So it's "X trillion", where X could be anything between 2 and 999, and trillion could be 10**12 or 10**18. :)

    1. Re:Trillion by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Maybe this is what Deep Thought's answer was about....

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  9. Re:GOOGLE READS YOUR EMAIL by dejitaru · · Score: 1

    uh, i'm pretty sure everyone knows that nowadays. And, it's their machines that are scanning your emails to serve you better ads. Outlook .com still scan your subject titles fyi

  10. Google archives at least 2T searches per year... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    along with each author's identity, age, location, computer model, browser features, sexual preference, yadda-yadda-yadda.

  11. Meanwhile in reality.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google France is getting raided for $1,800,000,000 in unpaid taxes!

    Google = Steal everyone's content, never pay for anything (ie youtube), and present it for free, while reaping all the financial benefits. On top of that, not pay any taxes on all of this income that was garnered from stealing everyone's content.

    Sounds like a socialist's master's dream.

    1. Re:Meanwhile in reality.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't forget Google's wholesale scanning of entire libraries of copyrighted books! But that's okay, because Google gives out snippets of the books for free, even though Google has maintains complete copies that it never paid for and data-mines everyone for profit who uses the facility.

  12. Search Engine Land by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 1

    That last sentence is some advanced investigative journalism for sure...

    --
    That is all.
  13. Honestly? by wjcofkc · · Score: 1

    I would have thought the number would be higher.

    --
    Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
  14. Parent is from Bizarro-land by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Steal everyone's content, never pay for anything (ie youtube)

    This is absolutely not true. You should reread the comments on that article. Also, if YouTube is bringing in more financial benefits than deficits, this is the first anyone has heard of it.

    What all this has to do with public ownership of the means of production is beyond me, but maybe you're just using "socialist" to mean "something I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit."

  15. Must be higher by schnurble · · Score: 1

    Two trillion searches per year is ~64,000 searches per second.

    That number is very not impressive.

    I suspect the correct number is at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude higher.

    --
    "To err is human, to forgive is simply not my policy." --root
    1. Re:Must be higher by epine · · Score: 1

      That number is very not impressive. I suspect the correct number is at least one, if not two, orders of magnitude higher.

      200 trillion searches per year requires 10 billion clients making an average of 55 searches per day, 24/7/52.177.

      Your estimation skills are very not impressive.

    2. Re:Must be higher by epine · · Score: 1

      By the way, I'm not counting the incremental search Google does before you press enter, because I only consider those results approximate.

      If that's included, who gives a shit about this question in the first place?

  16. Bad headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google is now handling 2 trillion searches a year? Or Google Now is handling 2 trillion searches a year? I suspect they mean the former, although they specified the latter.

  17. How many, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    More interesting would be how many _unique_ searches. All the searches for "funny dog videos" should count as a single search. Even if the result changes.

  18. Not from me by cerberusss · · Score: 1

    I'm using Google less and less, it makes me feel uncomfortable to input so much data into that company. I've started using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine: https://duckduckgo.com/

    I still have a free (grandfathered) Google Apps for Domains account though. So obviously costs beat privacy concerns everytime :)

    --
    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  19. 2 Trillion Searches by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And none of them were from me.

    The difference between startpage.com, ixquick.com and ixquick.eu is that SP.com, IQ.com use Google, IQ.eu does not.

  20. Re:GOOGLE READS YOUR EMAIL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Of course Microsoft will NEVER EVER read your email.

    No one there can read.