Guest contributor Matt Beswick crunches the numbers on Google search and looks at what they mean to your SEO campaigns.
For a company that’s only existed for the past 15 years or so, Google has had an immense impact on how we operate in everyday society whether it’s in a personal or professional setting. Their search engine absolutely dominates the web search industry, handling two-thirds of all web queries on any given day.
Each month, the sheer volume of queries it answers continues to grow at a feverish pace.
Even more important than the total number of inquiries addressed is the manner in which they’re processed. As the science of search evolves, Google’s methods continue to change to adapt to the new reality.
A quick history of Google
In 1998, when Google’s search engine first debuted, it indexed just 25 million web pages and processed a mere 10,000 searches per day.
Nowadays, Google has nearly 50 billion pages indexed and counting. The company as a whole sifts through a whopping 25 or more petabytes of data every day.
Even though the average number of searches per computer and the profitability of each search has decreased in the past few years, it’s still a huge business. All that number-crunching continues to beef up net income for Google, which is on track to earn $40 billion in revenue in 2012.
Traffic and volume
As of July 2012, Google answers over 3 billion queries every day from users in 180 or more countries around the planet. That translates to at least 35,000 queries every second.
Compare that to a grand total of 3.6 million searches in Google’s first year of operation, and the scope of their exponential growth becomes apparent.
Google’s handy Search Globe ‘experiment’ allows users to visualize the number of searches conducted globally every day by location. However you chart it, the rise in search traffic continues unabated.
Queries and algorithms
With so much of the world’s web traffic eventually passing through Google’s server racks, there’s always been a massive incentive to game the results. Google’s algorithm changes are necessarily a defensive move that’s always playing catchup with the spammers and Black Hat SEO tactics that gum up the works with sub-par content.
Every query that Google processes costs them money, which they recoup through advertising dollars. However, lousy content doesn’t really help their customers or their bottom line. Google actually tweaks their algorithms hundreds of times a year, but you really only hear about the major updates that tend to roll out every spring.
Penguin, Panda and the collateral damage
Typically, the large updates like Panda “shake the tree” and drastically impact how sites will rank overnight.
The most recent new update was April 2012’s Penguin, which affected at least 3.1 percent of all search queries. So, what does that really mean? In short, the numbers are staggering. A 3.1 percent shift is the equivalent of 90,000,000 daily queries, or 32,850,000,000 every year.
But what about Panda? Since it rolled out in February last year, there have been a total of 17 iterations each affecting a different percentage of search queries. I know there’s going to be overlap, but if we go for a big number that’s potentially 186,150,000,000 queries affected by one cute little black and white animal.
If you now take into consideration that, on average, there’s algorithm turbulence on most days, it’s safe to assume that there aren’t enough zeros on my keyboard to show just how much change goes on behind the scenes.
Over and out
The unrelenting increase in overall web search traffic and the accompanying incentive to play shady SEO games with the search results make sweeping periodic Google updates an inevitability.
In the coming years, mobile search and social media are going to be the future for Google, and every other search engine for that matter. As always, Google’s primary objective will be to deliver exactly what any particular user is looking for given a specific search term so the amount of flux is only likely to increase.
My advice? Be aware of the numbers, but don’t chase them—SEO is about long-term marketing success, not dissecting the will of Google.
