Google Search Trivia
November 26, 2008
MarketWatch reported the Nielsen Online MegaView Search rankings for October 2008 on November 25, 2008. You can read the small print table here. (This is a wacky url, and the link may go dead at any moment.) One comment in the article caught my attention:
An estimated 4.8 billion search queries were conducted at Google Search, representing 61.2 percent of all search queries conducted during the given time period.
With our trusty pencil and paper, one of my colleagues created this table:
| 4,800,000,000 | queries in 31 days |
| 154,838,710 | per day |
| 6,451,613 | per hour |
| 107,527 | per minute |
| 1,792 | per second |
Google’s plumbing appears to operate at about 1,700 queries per second. Seems speedy to me. If my assistant’s math is wacky, let me know. My thought was that if you divide the number of queries per second per month into Google’s capital expenditures over the last decade, you get another big number. In fact, that big number is the one that companies competing with Google have to match or better yet beat either by dumping money on the problem or being smarter than Google. One challenge is that Google, despite its cut backs, is not slowing down in the infrastructure department so the gap between Google and its nearest competitor may be increasing. What’s your take on these numbers? Useful or baloney?
Stephen Arnold, November 26, 2008
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