21 Mind-Boggling “Google” Statistics

Google is a household name and for good reason. It’s become such a helpful part of our lives that it has invaded our lexicon. If someone doesn’t know the answer to a question, what do we say? Google it. It’s an incredibly popular search engine and platform, a technological Mr.-Know-It-All that we run to for the answers to our problems. 

Looking for the meaning of a word? Google it. Want to know the latest juicy celebrity news? Google it. Want to lose that stubborn belly fat? Google it.

Whatever the question, Google has the answer.

We use Google so much that it is now an official verb of the English language, recognised by the Oxford Dictionary. Not only that, but Google has also become more than just a search engine; it owns Gmail, YouTube, Android, Google Drive, and a lot of everyday software and apps which will be discussed below.

It’s almost like a person who lives with us 24/7 and helps us do small (and big!) tasks throughout the day. If you don’t know how enormous Google is, we have compiled a list of some crazy facts to clue you in on just how influential it has become.

Prepare to be blown away.

1.    There are 226 million searches in a minute!

Although Google doesn’t publicly share its search volume data, it is estimated that Google processes approximately a whopping 63,000 search queries every second. You might think it’s a pretty small number but wait till you do the math and realise that it translates to 226 million searches a minute, 5.6 billion searches per day, and more than 2 trillion global searches per year.

We know for a fact that you’re hurrying over to Google right now to search how many zeros a trillion has!

2.     Google dominates over 90% share of the search engine market.

There are other search engines out there, people just rarely use them.

Google has captured more than 90% of the market share of search engines, while less popular like Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo account for around 2% each. Peanuts.

3.     There has been a 2000% increase in search traffic since ’98.

We know that Google’s yearly searches are somewhere around 2 trillion, but obviously, this was not the case decades ago. In 1998, Google’s yearly search queries stood at just 1 billion.

Today, that’s increased by 2000 percent. Not 20 or 200 but 2000 percent growth in 20 years! There are a lot more internet users today than there was 20 years ago; so, the entire credit of this growth doesn’t go to Google alone, but its impressive, nonetheless.

4.     An average user performs 3 to 4 searches daily.

According to data specialists, average users perform 3 to 4 searches a day. This might seem low, but it’s just an average of the overall internet population. You might have 15-20 searches one day when shopping online or doing academic research and might not even open Google the next day.

Still, if you think about it, some of us may not say “Hi” to 4 people a day, yet we often go to Google for more than that.

5.     15% of all Google searches are unique!

You would think after a certain point, Google would just be getting similar searches, regarding weather, locations, celebrity news, and the meaning of life, but a good chunk of all searches — 15 percent to be exact — are totally unique.

This means people are always looking for new information or content on the internet, creating opportunities for websites to publish valuable and optimized content and direct this traffic towards them.

6.     Google Maps accounts for 13 percent of all searches.

We routinely use Google Maps for navigation but did 13 percent of all is a huge number. This equates to about 260 billion searches each year. We know how easy it is to get lost, but 13 percent of ALL searches are a LOT of searches.

 Still, we are glad it exists. Google maps have certainly got us out of some sticky situations whilst traveling.

7.     Google Maps comprises 20 petabytes of data!

Since Google Maps contains satellite imagery of the Earth, it uses 21 Petabytes of space to store this data.

If you are not familiar, one Petabyte is equal to 1 quadrillion bytes. This means you’ll need 328,125 of 64GB modern-day smartphones to store all of Google Maps’ data.

That is a lot of phones!

8.     Chrome has 69% of the market share.

Google remains the most influential force, even among browsers. Since it is an open-source program, Google Chrome is widely used and is the first choice of internet users when it comes to browsing, with the closest runner-up in the browser market share being Safari, which is used by roughly 18% of internet users.

That leaves tiny pieces of the pie to be shared among Samsung Internet, UC Browser, Firefox, and Opera, which have less than 4% share each.

9.     Google Chrome has billions of installs.

Despite not being the default browser on two major smartphones (Samsung and iPhone), Google Chrome still has over 5 billion downloads, which goes to show that people really love it and prefer it to other browsers. It is a seamless browsing experience, saving browsing histories, passwords and integrating data across all devices, making it incredibly user-friendly.

10. Chrome protects millions of people from malware!

Chrome is preferable for its security and reliability against malicious and harmful websites. Each month the browser protects 200 million people’s phones and computers from unsecured websites created to damage or hack systems.

How does Chrome do it? It analyzes the host of information (the website you visit) and places high security on it. If a website doesn’t have SSL/TLS encryption, Google will direct less traffic towards it, negatively affecting the site’s overall ranking.

11. More than 1 billion videos are viewed every day!

After Google, the second biggest search platform is Google’s own video broadcasting website: YouTube.

There are over one billion videos viewed every day on YouTube. To put that into context, that makes 41 million per hour and 694,000 videos per minute. There is something for everyone to watch on YouTube, from tutorials, reviews, to music videos, movies and documentaries, but 1 billion videos a day means people might be spending more time on YouTube than they should be.

We aren’t judging though.

12. Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube daily.

The first YouTube video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, but today, 400 hours’ worth of YouTube videos are uploaded every day. To put that in perspective: it would take you at least 17 or 18 days to watch the content uploaded to YouTube in a single day!

13. There are billions of active Android users each MONTH!

Over 2 billion, in fact. That’s right, not a year, not a quarter… 2 billion active Android users every single month. If we added Apple (iOS) users to this number, the number of active smartphone users each month would be astronomical.

14. Android controls 85% percent of the mobile market.

We see hysterical kids lining up for the new iPhone and tend to assume that Apple has got the mobile market sewn up, but in fact, Android is the king of the mobile market, ruling an astounding 85% of the mobile operating system market.

This is a tremendous lead that Apple will likely never catch.

15. There are so… many… apps!

The average internet user utilises 10 or 12 apps on average, flipping back and forth between Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and now Tik Tok, but the actual number of available apps on the Google Play Store is enormous— with over 2.7 million apps available for download, many of them for free (Shame on you, Apple!).

16. Gmail is… popular

As of 2021, Gmail has 1.8 billion active users, and the number is only increasing. If you needed that put in perspective for you, that means that there’s one active Gmail account for every five people on the planet. Gmail’s market share is 31%, just slightly behind the king of the hill, Apple, with 34%.

17. Gmail blocks 100 million spam emails daily.

Google is popular in part because people tend to trust the company with their sensitive and personal data. Google actually blocks harmful websites, phishers, and spam emails every day, with about 100 million emails finding their way into the spam/junk folders of Gmail daily.

18. Google is currently valued at over $1 trillion.

In 2020, Google became the fourth American company to reach a $1 trillion market valuation (which is now roughly around $1.5 trillion). The only American companies considered “bigger” are Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. What is interesting about Google’s meteoric rise is that the aforementioned companies went public earlier than Google did.

In 2016, Google was valued at $500 billion, and in five years, it has more than doubled that value. Astounding!

19. Makes billions a year from advertising.

Google is not only the market leader in search engines (by a huge margin), but also online advertising. In fact, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, made 80% of its money from Google’s advertising business in 2020— a whopping $147 billion from advertising.

This revenue is generated by either selling ad space to websites under the Google Ads program or collecting search history data to create personalised user experiences with partner websites.

This is the reason you start seeing ads about the things you search on the internet.

20. Google employs WAY fewer people than you think!

Google is a household name, with an enormous market cap and profit margin. As such, you might expect such a corporate giant to employ millions across the world, but the actual number is not even close to that.

As of today, Google employs roughly 135,000 full-time staff. This is a minuscule workforce when compared to other technology companies like Apple, which employs three times more staff, while Amazon, quite understandably, has over 1.3 million employees worldwide. This highlights the efficiency of Google’s policies, as well as their company culture, are employee-focused mentality.

21. Google doesn’t own Google!

Google is actually owned by another company called Alphabet, which also owns YouTube plus more than 200 other companies. There are countless mergers and acquisitions in Google’s history, including the acquisition of Motorola in 2011 with the intention of gaining their patent portfolio on mobile phones and wireless technologies to help the company with its ongoing patent disputes with rival companies.