Comment by AdamSC1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdamSC1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If you'd like to go by searches rather than visits:

At DuckDuckGo we are averaging roughly 17 million searches a day right now (duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

Google says they did 2 trillion searches last year[1], and while usually their search metrics include Youtube, Google Maps and Gmail queries let's assume it was all searches. That'd be roughly 5.5 billion searches a day.

So now we're talking ~1/322 or just shy of 40lbs. That's roughly the size of a Hamadryas baboon or about 22 Mallard ducks - not a bad little flock! :)

Disclaimer: DDG staff. Opinions are my own. No animals were harmed in the poor construction of this analogy.

[1]http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillio...

Or one honey badger. 35 pounds or so.

Since when search metrics include YT, Maps and... Gmail?!? Unless you're talking about universal search results, I've never seen the numbers for all those products conflated.

If you look at the most recently public posted qSearch report on Feb 2016[2] you'll notice it talks about "Explicit Core Search" and "Powered By Reporting."

Powered By Reporting is listed as any search that is handled by Google or Bing. "Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at "Google entities", as well as searches on AOL and Ask’s MyWebSearch "[3]

In Comscores qSearch product that you can subscribe to, when you hit "Google Sites" it provides a drop down detailing the breakdown of all the properties. Search is hard to define when companies get to that size, and searches on other Google properties are indeed 'searches' but they are also different than searches on DuckDuckGo.

[2]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-... [3]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/comScore-September-201...

Those are third-party numbers. The "trillions" statement came from Google, where nobody conflates searches on Gmail with those on Web search. Your original message implied that Google inflates search numbers; I'll only say that that's a major assumption to make. (I used to know the exact numbers.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com