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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.

18 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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....

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  5. 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

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

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

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    That is all.
  7. 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...

  8. Honestly? by wjcofkc · · Score: 1

    I would have thought the number would be higher.

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  9. 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?

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

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

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  11. 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.
  12. 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 :)

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