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Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

So... about 160 qps? (Using the 5B queries annualized). Even if you multiply by 10 to account for a very high peak to average, that's sub-2000.

I wish companies wouldn't try to make something seem big by using "billions". It took me billions of nanoseconds to write this comment...

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To have something to compare the number with: DuckDuckGo's average seems to be around 1,100-1,200 qps. [1] For Google, it's estimated to be around 63,000 qps [2].

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

[2]: https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/business-essentia...

Google said in their last Zeitgeist (2012) that they served 1.2 trillion search queries that year, and in the same year they reported $30 billion revenue from their own sites. In 2021 they reported $150 billion in "Search & other" revenue which is categorically similar. In real dollars that's a quadrupling of traffic, so you can conclude they might have served 4-5 trillion queries in 2021.

This isn't about technology. It's about marketing. It's about finding / establishing a market beyond Google's stranglehold.

So what‘s your argument here? 160 search queries per second is very impressive. These aren‘t request to a stupid api, but users actually using a tool.

Sorry, I should have been more clear: I just dislike the use of "billions!!!" when what should be discussed is either qps (system load) or daily-active users (engagement).

You could guesstimate DAU from qps by choosing a "queries per day" number (e.g., 10?) and assume the queries are done over just 8 hours. That's 1.25 queries per hour per user. Multiplying these terms out, you get ~500k DAU.

You probably aren't a fan of Carl Sagan then :-) [1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billions_and_Billions

I am! That's billions of a metric that people would agree is "a lot" :).

Billions of searches per year is just a weird metric that obscures what you'd actually want to know.

Billions queries and 500k DAU indicate that the service is used, they communicate essentially the same information.

I’m not sure why you think they’re making an argument - they aren’t claiming anything as far as I can tell

How do you figure? They are making an argument that 2.5 billion searches isn't impressive, and Brave is framing it in "yearly searches" so they can use the word "billion" because it doesn't sound as impressive if you frame it in "searches per second".

Where did they say that 2.5 billion isn’t impressive?

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