In researching my interview with paid search engine enthusiast Sridhar Ramaswamy, I wanted to know exactly how many search queries Google answers every second. It turned out that neither Google nor the internet wanted to share its secrets with me: the Google comms team came back with a vague answer about “billions of queries every day”. The only public numbers were out of date and smelled unreliable.
I took it back to two data sources and went from there. Using DuckDuckGo’s query numbers for April 2021 combined with StatCounter market share numbers for search I created the table below. The model estimates there are around 200,000 search queries made every second, the majority of them on Google. While the numbers are heavily dependent on the accuracy of the market shares, it seems safe to say Google is doing over 100,000 queries every second and over 10 billion queries a day.
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