How big is Google?

Ever wondered just how much power the worlds most visited website holds? According to online security company Arbor Networks, Google represents 6.4 per cent of all internet traffic. There is no specific breakdown of which sites produce this traffic. For instance Google also owns YouTube, the third most visited site online, and gmail.com that ranks 2,385th globally.

Google.com is currently the most visited domain online and so it is most likely the one that brings in most of the traffic.

In October, Google’s browser Chrome grew by 0.49 per cent taking its total share of the internet browser market to 8.47 per cent.

Google.com has a lot of tools available on it including Google Maps, Image Search and a news aggregator. But the internet giant offers almost everything that you could want to do online including Google Patents, which lets you know if someone else has patented your idea or not.

Google Quotes takes specific quotations from news articles so you can find out what memorable things your favourite celebs or political figures have said, along with other information like where and when.

A personal favourite of mine is Google City Tours which merges Google Maps and Local. This lets you find things that interest you in the city you are in – it will even plan the quickest route so you can get to as many as possible.

Many of these tools have been created at the Googleplex, but many are built off start-ups that Google has simply purchased and rebranded.

What I find most impressive about the amount of visitors Google has been receiving is that the amount of total internet traffic has been growing by 40 to 45 per cent year on year.

Google’s market share of the internet has increased by more than one per cent since January. That sounds tiny; but given the fact the total internet traffic has grown by 20 per cent, that one per cent represents thousands of new users.

According to Roxor there are 193 million registered domains; 46 per cent are .coms, containing over 5 million terabytes of data. Google’s index size is 200 terabytes, which means that only 0.004 per cent of its server space is being used.

The internet is expected to hit two billion users before the end of the year; currently there are 1.9 billion people online. This means over 30 per cent of the world’s population will have the ability to log on and use any number of tools the company has to offer. Although Google is currently the most visited website in the world will it continue? With an ever increasing base of users and start-up search engines will consumers tastes in different countries mean they go elsewhere to find things online? Only time will tell…