16% of the queries on Google each day are brand new (never seen before) | Hacker News Reader

16% of the queries on Google each day are brand new (never seen before)

google.com

145 pointskunle37 comments

I actually don't believe that...or, at least, I don't believe it means what I think I'm supposed to believe it means.

If they do 3 billion queries per day[1], that's almost 500 million new queries every day. You gotta figure most misspellings and typos are repeats..

[1] http://www.quora.com/How-many-search-queries-does-Google-ser...

I assume the 16% are supposedf to mean 16% for distinct queries. The well-known queries and common typos are entered a lot more frequently - so a huge portion of those 16% may actually just be bored people googling for "fist-on-keyboard"

If that's the case, it's a very misleading statistic. If you have 1 million each of "facebook", "fcaebook", "facebok", "faceook", and "fakebook", and one "asdweniviwnxoemmgmejvj v fef", it's kind of spin to say "we’ve never seen 16% of the queries we see every day."

Think about all the searches that are related to current events. Assuming most of these events have never happened, that's a lot of new, unique searches.

> Assuming most of these events have never happened, that's a lot of new, unique searches.

How about some examples of these "most" events that haven't happened before?

Sure, Clooney hasn't gone on vacation with Kiebler before but ....

I can believe it easily. There are many millions of potential values for each element in the search and an unlimited number of elements per search. And the order matters (presumably).

Keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of relatively common words in English alone. At least as many relatively uncommon ones (including stuff like HackerNews). Then there are dozens of popular languages with probably hundreds of thousands of words each, millions of unique misspellings of words in every language, and numbers from a variety of common uses (dates, serial numbers, math problems, etc.).

People also search for character strings from computer code and the like when they are troubleshooting.

And it's not that hard to see instances where the average person would be tapping into all of that variety in a real-life search.

"map of 'address' in 'city'"

"concerts in 'city' on 'date'"

"'arbitrarily long song lyric, movie quote, book quote -- including errors'"

"'math problem from school or life'"

"'product name' vs 'product name'"

"'athlete' 'performance metric' since 'date'"

"serial number 'part description'"

"'person name' 'town name'"

"'phone number'"

Every time you do a google search, try to think if anyone else might have searched for it before. I do a lot of google searching for specific programming-related questions, and some of my terms are long and obscure enough that I'm fairly confident the exact query was never made before.

An additional consideration is the "dynamic" search that google implemented recently[1]. While you're typing, it'll guess what your final query is likely to be and display the results. Of course, the guess will usually be something that's been queried before, but if you are typing a completely new query then it will sometimes query a number of intermediate steps before you've finished typing. If this statistic includes queries of this sort, then this could contribute significantly to the number of new queries.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-tha...

Interesting facts, but here's one I didn't understand:

"By 2012, there will be 2.3 billion mobile devices in use, the equivalent of 70% of the world’s population."

What does that mean? Something bad will happen between now and beginning of January? Virus infecting drones (mobile devices), to terminate 3.5 billion people, so that 2.3 billion = 0.7 * world population in 2012, for example?

I assume they mean 70% of the mobile phone market.

Doesn't sound right. Mobile devices accounts for 70% of mobile phone market?

actually, the current world population estimate is 7 billion, not 6.

I just did http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=... and took the first number from the top... Looking back it was actually the number from 2009.

That statistic is weird however you might want to interpret it because it in no way accounts for people having multiple phones, which is in no way rare.

I'm sure it's not rare as in unheard of, but to have any significant impact on the number of people carrying 2.3 billion devices, there would need to be hundreds of millions of people with multiple phones. I have no idea of the statistics, but I wouldn't think it would be anywhere near that common.

If you click-scroll to the factoid to that stat's left, they seem to be comparing mobile with desktops. So they may mean, "70% of the world's population of internet users/devices", which is plausible.

I'm interested to know whether the novel query rate is changing over time. If it's increasing, that might be an indicator that google users are trying to refine their search terms in response to the creeping SEOization of the search results they're getting.

"Creeping SEOization" could also be stated as keyword space filling up—a natural effect of the web growing—so queries are getting more specific.

Another possible factor is that users are becoming more savvy search users, or even trusting that they will get meaningful results for novel queries (e.g. Vietnamese Restaurants in Saskatoon).

Thought this stat from the "Search improves the bottom line" was a little lame:

89% of the traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic clicks when ads are paused.*

Google Search Ads Pause Studies, July 2011 *For those who have been running paid search campaigns.

My parsing of this interprets it as: "89% of advertisers aren't dumb enough to compete with their own organic SEO traffic by placing paid ads sponsoring the same keywords."

Depends, in some cases, for stuff that converts really well, it's not such a bad idea. Improves your chances of getting a click. I think stuff like bidding on your precise company name is probably a waste in a lot of cases where the person is already searching for you and you have little/ no real competition on the term.

It's all about CAC and many times showing up in both places returns an excllent conversion rate. AdWorda users who blindly bid on any keyword without this type of tracking are dumb, not advertisers who bid for already well performing organic terms.

What if the competition is there above your organic results?

I have organic listings ranked in the top 1-3 spots for my niche and I'm still buying Adwords for the same keywords, because PPC really does drive different traffic compared to organic. A few months ago Google suspended my account (apparently by mistake) and I noticed a significant drop-off in traffic. When my account was reinstated, I was happy to be paying for traffic again.

Are you saying it is worth it for the NY Times to advertise on the search term "NY Times"? I see examples like this all the time but it makes no sense to me. In fact, the only ad-links I click on are these.

You just gave me my first data point from the web site owners perspective ... that your traffic goes up enough for it to be worth it. Why do you think this is the case? I would really appreciate any insight on this!

I would say it is. I know my parents routinely click on the ads at or near the top of the google page thinking they are the legitimate search results.

You're right. But that doesn't make sense to me. I do the same thing. The point is that I would end up clicking on the search result anyways had the paid link not been there. What am I missing here?

It is a very cheap way (quality score is high for your own business name) to advertise the fact that "this is a business that is reputable/savy/spending enough to invest in ads and appear on Google." I really don't know how much that is worth, but it must count for something. Especially if you use Adwords for branding campaigns.

You're correct. I guess it could be viewed as an insurance policy against falling out of the top search results?

The other viewpoint would be that it prevents your competitors from doing the same.

A few years ago I heard Sergey say it was 20% ... so I guess the number is gently trending down.

Would be cool to see the curve for this.

I would think search queries are getting less diverse now, especially with google suggest giving you autocompletion - I find it very often gives much better results to look at the top domain queries (e.g "online marketing strategies", "online marketing tips", "online marketing best practices" for marketing), look at the results, have a feel for what the right wording is, and then refine your queries.

I find that much easier to do than randomly type the first sentence that comes to mind.

Very interesting. This one is one level up on the tree:

http://www.google.com/ads/answers/

I'm amused at the juxtaposition of these two:

>Five stars beat four stars every time.

> When you’re hungry, the best sandwich is usually the closest one.

> By 2012, there will be 2.3 billion mobile devices in use, the equivalent of 70% of the world’s population.

Given that the world population is estimated to hit 7 billion next spring, I think this number is a bit absurdly off. 70% of 7 billion is 4.9 billion.

I think google should use google next time they need to find out the world population, because they're estimating it at 3.3 billion.

By population I think they are limiting it to 'people who use the internet and could use google'.

another proof human is actually creative :-)

Thanks for defining brand new.

Is this new? Am I just finding this after John Andrews' post a few days ago as a coincidence? http://www.johnon.com/764/seo-myths.html

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