How Many Searches Each Day? – August Update

I was tooling around Wordtracker through the week, doing some keyword research for a client.

There’s a statement on the ‘Step 4′ page – competitive analysis – that tells me that Google is responsible for 47.05% of all searches, around 278 million per day.

So when I do the figgers, that comes out to be 590,000,000 searches globally per day. This sorta ties in with my earlier calculation. Of course, the raw data could have the same bases, but even so I feel confident that the real number, as at August 2007, is around 550-600 million searches per day.

How Many Searches Done Each Day?

I spent a bit of time googling for information about how many searches are made around the world, each and every day. I thought it might be a very big number, but this information just doesn’t seem to be available (at least not anywhere I looked).

So here’s my “back of the envelope” calculations, using February 07 data from Nielsen//Netratings.

The first thing is to look at the US search share rankings, which is data I know is available from Nielsen//Netratings. From the February press release we see that Google accounted for 3,597,697,000 searches and this was 55.8% of the US total. From this, we calculate 6,450,000,000 total searches during February.

So far, so good. Now from global and US figures we see that the US represents 44.8% (146,817,112/327,835,46) of the global “Active Digital Media Universe”, as Nielsen//Netratings call Internet users. If we now assume that everyone’s web searching habits are the same as the US (I know, this is a stretch), we calculate that 14,400,000,000 searches were made globally during February 2007.

That’s a lot of searches.

February is a short month, so that’s around 515,000,000 per day.

Still hard to digest? That works out to be a staggering 6,000 searches per second.

Good reason, I think, to make sure the web search engines know your web site well.

Sizing Up Web Search

OK, I admit this is semi-useless information… but I was wondering just how many documents are in the big search engines today. It’s easy to find information on how many net denizens there are in the world (1,114,274,426 – no more and no less) how many domains are active (87,043,715), and how many new domains got registered yesterday (2,039,625). But how many pages are out there?

No-one’s telling. Yet you’d have to assume the search engines, whose business is basically to go out and find them all, would know.

After a quick search I found that the method people were using was to enter the search term *a* and see what the total count was. I did it a few times and got different results throughout the evening, but here they are anyway:

• Google -  29,610,000,000
• Yahoo! – 13,500,000,000
• MSN Live – 2, 550,000,000

There’s a lot of commentary about how useless this information is, and why search engine relevance is the important thing. I totally agree.  If I enter a search for something and find that I’m viewing result 1-10 out of 44 million, well that’s useless information. I’d rather have just one result, which of course is the one I was looking for in the first place (even though I didn’t know it at the time).

Hello world!

Welcome to the brand new, squeaky clean Stratify blog.

On these pages you’ll find news, views and general musings about the things we do (or would like to do) at Stratify, and sometimes just the things we’d like to share with you.

The platform we’re using is a hosted WordPress blog. rather than install the whole WordPress shebang on our own server, we though this very, very easy approach would suffice. Besides, we’re sick of static-paged websites (like the main Stratify site at www.stratify.com.au)  and in this modern, Web2.0 era it makes a lot of sense to put up a platform we can access anywhere.

Comments will be left open on all posts. I’ve used the Askimet plugin a few times now and found it to be very effective in identifying and eliminating blog spam. This, though, is the first time I’ve seen it available on a hosted blog.

Enjoy the posts and comments you’ll find here and please, please drop a comment whenever you feel like it.