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Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average (visualize them here), which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. The chart below shows the number of searches per year throughout Google's history:

Google Searches per YearSearch 

 

When Google was founded in September 1998, it was serving ten thousand search queries per day ^[1] (by the end of 2006 that same amount would be served in a single second). In September 1999, one year after being launched, Google was already answering 3.5 million search queries daily. ^[1]

Nine months later and, in mid 2000, search volume had increased fivefold, reaching 18 million queries on an average day. ^[1] By the time Google announced its IPO in April 2004, users around the world were submitting more than 200 million queries to Google every day.

In August 2012, Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President at Google and responsible for the development of Google Search, disclosed that Google's search engine found more than 30 trillion unique URLs on the Web, crawls 20 billion sites a day, and processes 100 billion searches every month ^[2] (which translate to 3.3 billion searches per day and over 38,000 thousand per second).

This figure was confirmed by Google Zeitgest 2012, which reported 1.2 trillion searches for 2012.^[3]

Curious facts

• In 1999, it took Google one month to crawl and build an index of about 50 million pages. 
  In 2012, the same task was accomplished in less than one minute. ^[4]
• 16% to 20% of queries that get asked every day have never been asked before. ^[4]
• Every query has to travel on average 1,500 miles to a data center and back to return the answer to the user. ^[4]
• A single Google query uses 1,000 computers in 0.2 seconds to retrieve an answer. ^[7]

Google search growth rate

After expanding significantly in the first decade of the 21st century, Google's search volume growth rate started to decline in 2009 and 2010, and is currently estimated to be at around 10% per year.

In the start-up phase growth was phenomenal, with a 17,000% year to year increase in search volume between 1998 and 1999, 1000% between 1999 and 2000, and 200% between 2000 and 2001. Google search continued to grow at rates of between 40% to 60% between 2001 and 2009, when it started to slow down stabilizing at a 10% to 15% rate in recent years.

Google Search Volume Growth Rate (%)Growth Rate

 

Google's share of global search

According to a 2013 comScore public release ^[5][6], as of December 2012, Google enjoyed a 65.2% share of web search volume worldwide, with 114.7 billion searches that month.

Baidu has a 8.2% share (14.5 billion searches in December 2012).
Yahoo 4.9% (8.6 billions searches in December 2012).
Yandex 2.8% (4.8 billions searches December 2012).
Microsoft sites (mostly Bing) 2.5% (4.5 billions searches December 2012).

Google Baidu Yahoo Yandex Microsoft 5.8% 9.9% 78%

 

 

 

 

 

Even though as Yandex and Baidu might be growing at a somewhat faster rate compared to Google, the distance between Google and the other search engines in terms of search volume is so vast that any moderate growth differential doesn't impact Google's global leadership in any significant way (see chart below).

Number of monthly searches worldwide (in billions)GoogleBaiduYahooYandexMicrosoft

 

Sources

http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/#sources 

Current Google search volume estimates are delivered by Worldometers' algorithm, which processes data elaborated through statistical analysis after being collected from the following sources:

• Amit Singhal - Responsible of Google Search. Senior Vice President and Google Fellow, Google Inc.
• Ben Gomes - Leading Google Search Features Engineer. Vice President and Google Fellow, Google Inc.
• Google Zeitgest
• comScore qSearch
• Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land
• GigaOM

References

1. Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. New York: Portfolio. (September 2005).
2. Sullivan, Danny. "Google: 100 Billion Searches Per Month, Search To Integrate Gmail, Launching Enhanced Search App For iOS." Search Engine Land. August 8, 2012.
3. Google Zeitgest 2012
4. Mitchell, Jon. "How Google Search Really Works." Readwrite. February 29, 2012.
5. Meyer, David. "Microsoft down to fifth place in comScore’s global search stats, thanks to Yandex." GigaOM. February 6, 2013.
6. Sullivan, Danny. "Google Still World’s Most Popular Search Engine By Far, But Share Of Unique Searchers Dips Slightly." Search Engine Land. February 11, 2013.
7. Dean, Jeff (Google Senior Fellow). "Building Software Systems At Google and Lessons Learned" [video]. Stanford University, November 10, 2010.