Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Both figures seem unlikely, given that Google served ~2 trillion searches last year and did not spend $151 billion doing it. (The entire company spent on the order of $20 billion in 2013, and that's for everything.)

http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/ https://investor.google.com/earnings/2013/Q4_google_earnings...

View on HN

The grandparent mentioned $.07 per 1000 searches, not per search. I think that brings the figure down to something pretty reasonable. ($151 million.)

$140 million on search? I haven't a clue if that is high or low. Seems low if the company's total expenses were $20 billion.

The distinction here is that's for hardware cost only. I imagine salary costs are much higher.

Ah I knew I was missing something there. Thanks.

Estimates of "# of searches Google serves" are always fascinating to me. I don't see statisticbrain.com publishing a source for their estimate, although maybe I'm just missing something.

AFAIK, Google doesn't really publish a precise number. They often say things like "Over a billion searches a day". But then they keep that published estimate the same for years during which growth is obviously happening. At some point, they'll publish a step function upgrade to the estimate.

Of the top of my head 2 trillion searches sounds reasonable but I think there is a lot of fudge factor in that guess.

Where did you get your $151 billion figure from?

2 trillion searches at 0.07 cents per thousand is 2 * 10^12 / 10^3 * 0.07 = $140,000,000.

I think that's 2,161,530,000,000 searches * $0.07/search (he mistook it for $0.07 per search)

On the other hand, your post mistakenly reads 0.07 cents per thousand, though you did the calculation correctly.

Math is hard, let's go shopping for data centers!

Given the phrase cost to serve 1000 searches are you sure I was mistaken?

He's saying that it is 0.07 dollars per 100 searches instead of 0.07 cents (which would be 0.0007 dollars).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com