I spent a bit of time googling for information about how many searches are made around the world, each and every day. I thought it might be a very big number, but this information just doesn't seem to be available (at least not anywhere I looked).

So here's my "back of the envelope" calculations, using February 07 data from Nielsen//Netratings.

The first thing is to look at the US search share rankings, which is data I know is available from Nielsen//Netratings. From the February press release we see that Google accounted for 3,597,697,000 searches and this was 55.8% of the US total. From this, we calculate 6,450,000,000 total searches during February.

So far, so good. Now from global and US figures we see that the US represents 44.8% (146,817,112/327,835,46) of the global "Active Digital Media Universe", as Nielsen//Netratings call Internet users. If we now assume that everyone's web searching habits are the same as the US (I know, this is a stretch), we calculate that 14,400,000,000 searches were made globally during February 2007.

That's a lot of searches.

February is a short month, so that's around 515,000,000 per day.

Still hard to digest? That works out to be a staggering 6,000 searches per second.

Good reason, I think, to make sure the web search engines know your web site well.

Note: This post is duplicated on the http://www.stratify.com.au web site.