Back in April I wrote a post that attempted to put a number of the global number of searches every day. It was as rough as guts and any decent researcher would shoot holes in my methodology… but it continues to be the single most popular post on this blog, so I thought it was worthwhile to update the calculation with the latest figures available (October 07). Here goes.

My source documents are, again, from Nielsen//Netratings:

Global and US active Internet universe

US search share rankings

Following the methodology of the last post, there were 346,585,000 active Internet users around the world in October 2007. Of these, 148,228,000 (42.8%) were from the US. Now looking at the search share rankings, we see that Google had a 55.5% market share and 4,400,561,000 searches. So the total number of US-sourced searches in October is 7,928,939,000 searches across all search engines.

Extrapolating US searcher behaviour to the rest of the world (shoot me down, I know this is a copout), we calculate a staggering 18,538,552,000 searches during the month of October.

Per day? That’s 59,801,700.

Per second? Around 6,900.

I am sure there are search peaks many times this number. This calculation, for example, doesn’t consider how searches vary per hour (or even per minute) as various communities wake up, go to work, go to bed, etc every day. It doesn’t consider weekends, and it doesn’t consider the very different search habits around the world.

But the people who have this data ain’t sharing. This is as good as I can get it.