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Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year (searchengineland.com) 31

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.
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Google Now Handles At Least 2 Trillion Searches Per Year

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

    • by Anonymous Coward

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

  • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @05:07PM (#52174517) Homepage
    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.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      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.

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

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

  • I would have thought the number would be higher.
  • 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.

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      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.

      • by epine ( 68316 )

        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?

  • 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/ [duckduckgo.com]

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

"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical." -- Jon Carroll

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