Google Search Hits All-Time Usage Record

Google says the World Cup drove Search to its highest usage in history, with queries per second peaking right after Argentina's winning goal against Egypt. CNBC reports: The milestone comes as the company tries to prove its traditional search engine can keep its relevance in the age of AI, where chatbots have become more prevalent. Google still controls 90% of the search market, its stock price has more than doubled in the past year and revenue growth in the first quarter was the fastest for any period since 2022.

Google said its top searched query after the game was "argentina vs egypt." Globally, the company also saw people searching for things like "argentina x colombia" and "how many world cup goals does messi have." Additional queries included "what is it called when a player hits another player in game" and "is it messi's last world cup."

We need Google

[PPH]

... to answer the Zen question: What better search engines are out there?

Re:

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

Use startpage.com. It's Google without the tracking.

Re:

[awwshit]

I remember before Google using Altavista and scrolling through like 30 pages of results to find something.

Re:We need Google

[karmawarrior]

And now we just give up and find ways to reword everything.

Google was better than Altavista when AV was a thing. Once the effective competition disappeared and the term "Google" became synonymous with searching, they broke their product in the name of "engagement".

The really weird part to me is why none of the modern alternatives (DDG, Startpage, etc) are better. How hard could it be to implement a hard "include only these words, exactly as I spelled them"?

Re:We need Google

[93 Escort Wagon]

How hard could it be to implement a hard "include only these words, exactly as I spelled them"?

The issue is, I think, that those of us who want search engines to work exactly like that are in the minority.

Re:

[DigitalSorceress]

Also, the majority of us (in said minority) are probably running ad / tracking blockers (I run uBlock Origin on Waterfox with NoScript - which probably makes it easy to fingerprint me .. if not precisely, then as someone who is not going to watch/see their ads).

So yeah it would need to be a nonprofit or a paid engine.

I really liked the idea of Kagi but their reliance on Yandex (Russian owned /operated engine which Putin has had increasing say over since 2019)

I mean, I think somewhere there are projects that

Re: We need Google

[liqu1d]

It's weird because the alternative to search engines working like that is getting incorrect results, results for what they think you should have asked for instead and a incessant need to attach shopping results to every single query. I'm not sure how that's preferable to the general user unless they're not old enough to experience the old ways. I'm off to shout at clouds on my lawn.

Re:

[swillden]

How hard could it be to implement a hard "include only these words, exactly as I spelled them"?

The issue is, I think, that those of us who want search engines to work exactly like that are in the minority.

Tiny, tiny minority. And if you think you want that, you're wrong!

Also, it's worth pointing out that finding matching pages in a database of pages is indeed trivial -- and building that is utterly insufficient, because for any query that trivial matching algorithm will return a huge number of pages. Thousands, even for the most obscure technical terms, millions or tens of millions for more-common words.

The hard part of building a web search engine (and it's very, very hard) is ranking the results once

Re:

[PPH]

"How much space does a 10 foot Python need?"

Python is capitalized. So you must be referring to the programming language. And the correct answer would be: four tabs.

[Ducking and running]

Re:

[swillden]

LOL. I specifically mentioned that I use correct capitalization... so of course I screwed up the capitalization.

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

Those modern alternatives all use either google or bing as their backend, they might improve (de-crappify) the interface or add a layer obfuscating your private data but they are all still using google or bing.

It's like the web browser, most alternatives are still chrome underneath. We're doomed.

Re:

[sabbede]

You say that like searches in the old engines were anything other than exercises in rewording! Those are my most prominent memories of using WebCrawler and AltaVista. Rewriting the search terms again and again and again and then two or three more times before I started to see something like what I was looking for.

Re:

[Hadlock]

I've been paying for Kagi ($10/mo?) now for over a year across both personal and work devices and I don't miss it at all. The only time I still use google is if I need to buy a product and want to see what is available besides what is on amazon, i'll seach "toaster oven" to get inundated with ads (and then 12-48 hours later see ads for toaster oven across all my social medias and youtube). Turning off the googs cold-turkey and then selectively using it, it's been very interesting to see what kind of targete

Re:

[Frederic54]

I'm using Qwant for a couple of months, on both PC and phone, both in Firefox, it works well.

I do not use da goog

[codevark]

I hope there are others It smells.

Huh?

[Kunedog]

the company tries to prove its traditional search engine can keep its relevance in the age of AI

I would suggest the obsession with attaching AI to the search page/field/results like a parasite is not an indication they are trying very hard.

Queeries per second?

[outsider007]

Come on Google, that's no way to talk about World Cup fans!

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Certainly not when Egypt is one of the teams...

All caused by CFS Syndrome

[TheWho79]

Google users have been complaining for a few years of CFS (Can't Find Sh*t) since the AI take over. Of course "search" is at a an all time high - it now take 3 searches to get what you used to get in 1.

Re: All caused by CFS Syndrome

[Fortnite_Beast]

Google is an ad company. These repetitive searches sound like a win for them.

Re:

[doesnothingwell]

it now take 3 searches to get what you used to get in 1.

I think you meant to say, you have to pull up three times as many ads than before. Just a coincidence maybe, sort of.

I wonder how many of those were

[thegarbz]

Android users, typing the match name into the Google widget on their phone so that you could get the "Pin to notifications" button that put the live scores on their phone's lockscreen.

Also world cup searches aren't Google searches. No one is searching anything, they want Google to bring up their FIFA stats. This is more like people using an app frustrated that the app isn't working than anything related to a "search". Even now typing "argentina vs egypt" into Google opens Google's game info page rather than an actual search result.

It's too bad they don't provide numbers

[swillden]

It's too bad they don't provide numbers, because the numbers are incredible. I occasionally checked the search qps numbers when I worked at Google, just for fun, and... wow. Say what you will about Google, their scale is incredible. The services work so reliably and quickly that you don't often think about what the infrastructure must be like to handle it -- and you can't achieve that kind of scale just by throwing hardware at the problem, either (though lots of hardware is required, obviously). Every la