Google is in many countries the most popular and the most used search engine – which is neither a news nor a secret. But have you ever thought about what this popularity means in figures? How many queries per second, hour, day, month or year are processed? Certainly not really and if you do, the answer was probably: quite a lot! How much “quite a lot” really is, search giant Google has now revealed, by calling numbers. And those are really impressive!

Actually Google has never liked to talk about concrete figures on the searches. Why this has now changed, we do not know, but the fact is that now the numbers are called, although they are not very concrete. On the Google Adwords blog let Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce, leaked that there are trillion searches per year. It can therefore be at least 2 trillion here. And that’s really an impressive figure.

If we count down, that can be currently more than 64,000 queries per second. A number that you probably can not catch when you think about the processes behind such a request, the constantly running tests on different data centres etc. After thinking the imagination is already maxed out and you can just be amazed when you think of the miracles and the accomplishments of technology here and many other places.

For Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan confirmed the numbers. At the same time he has collected in the archives (and certainly also on Google) informations that Google has made over the past years. This demonstrates the development of the Internet and of course the search engine.

Searches per year:

• 1999: One billion
• 2000: 14 billion
• 2001-2003: 55 billion
• 2004 to 2008: 73 billion
• 2009: 365 billion
• 2010-2011: Unspecified
• 2012-2015: 1.2 trillion
• 2016: 2 trillion