Here's a reminder of just how huge Google search truly is
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
But self-driving cars and smart contact lenses aside, search is still Google's bread-and-butter.
Here are some fun facts about it:AdvertisementFirst, a trip down memory lane. Here's what Google's search page looked like back in 1997:
In 1998, the year Google officially launched, users were making about 500,000 searches per day. Now, there are more than 2.3 million Google searches per second.
Source: Google
That adds up to more than 100,000,000,000 Google searches per month.
Source: Google
For each one, Google takes over 200 factors into account before delivering you the best results to any query in 1/8 of a second.
Source: Google
People rely on Google's services so heavily that when they all went down for 5 minutes in 2013, global internet traffic dropped by 40%.
Source: CNET
Google's search index contains over 100 million gigabytes of data. It would take 100,000 one-terabyte personal drives to contain the same amount of data.
Source: Google
Although the 69% of internet browser users who have Chrome don't actually ever type out "Google.com" anymore, the company owns a bunch of domains that are common misspellings of Google, like Gooogle.com, Gogle.com, Googlr.com, and more. Google also owns 466453.com, too ...
Source: W3Schools
Google creates products that it hopes will matter to millions, or even billions, of people. However, it also takes on important projects that matter only to small groups: Google's internationalization team spent more than four years working with reps from Cherokee Nation to bring the language into search (it's also available on Gmail, Chromebooks, and Android).
Source: Cherokee.org
Since October 2015, more than half of Google's searches happen on mobile.
If you want to dive into your own digital archive, you can visit Google.com/history to see *every single search* tied to your account.
Google also makes it possible to download and delete your own information.
Although moonshot projects like internet-bearing balloons are sexier than ads, the latter keeps the company airborne. Google made ~90% of its revenue from advertising in 2015.
Source: Google
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