What did we do before Google? Since it arrived over 20 years ago, it has dominated the search engine market and seen unprecedented growth. Becoming one of the first tech ‘unicorns’, Google search has truly changed the world.
The behemoth search engine is now so intrinsic to our lives that it has become a verb.
‘Google’ is the third most Googled word in the world and Google.com is the most visited website in the US.
To reflect how impressive the company is, we’ve curated a selection of Google search statistics and facts that show how much Google has grown, how often it’s used, and included some Google statistics related to the economic impact it has in the US and the UK.
Who created Google?
1. The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin
The story of when Google started is now legendary. Larry met Sergey at Stanford university in 1995 when Sergey showed Larry around campus as a prospective student.
Their initial impressions of each other were not positive, but they went on to form an alliance through their intelligence.
2. Whilst at Stanford, from their dorm rooms, they outlined their idea for a search engine in The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine paper. Originally called Backrub, this was the foundation that would develop into Google.
Larry and Sergey’s mission was ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.‘
3. The name Google was chosen as a spin on the word Googol – a huge number used to compare large quantities. Written as 1 with 100 zeros. And chosen to echo how much information the search engine could have access to.
4. The first Google milestone was when Larry and Sergey received their first investment:
In August 1998 Google Inc was officially founded after an investment of $100,000 from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.
5. The first office for Google was in a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki (employee no.16 and now CEO of YouTube).
6. In June 1999, the first round of equity funding for Google was $25 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.
7. In march 2001, Eric Schmidt was hired and appointed as the first CEO of Google.
8. In December 2019, Larry and Sergey stepped down from Alphabet (Google).
9. Since December 2019, Sundar Pichai is the current CEO of Alphabet (Google)
When did Google start?
10. The google.com domain name was registered on September 15, 1997.
11. Google was created in 1998 when it was officially incorporated in September that year.
Founded: 1998
Incorporation: 4 September 1998
Initial public offering (NASDAQ): 19 August 2004
12. Google’s headquarters, known as the Googleplex was built in 2004 at 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States
How much is Google Search Statistics worth?
13. Alphabet (Google) is currently worth $1.598 trillion (market cap) and is the fifth most valuable company in the world.
Market capitalization (market cap) is the total market value of a public company’s shares and used as the measure for a company’s worth.
14. Google went public with its initial public offering (IPO), on August 19, 2004.
15. Google’s shares were first offered at $85 per share in 2004.
16. Google’s shares are now worth over $2,300 per share (May 2021).
17. In 2020, Google’s reported revenue was $181.69 billion. Mostly made up of advertising revenue of $146.9 billion.
18. In April 2021, Google reported revenue for Q1 2021 was $55.31 billion.
19. In 1999, Google tried to sell to Excite but CEO George Bell rejected the offer.
Google shareholders in 2021
20. As of May 2021, the top 5 Google shareholders are:
| 1 | The Vanguard Group Inc. | 21,522,942 |
| 2 | Lawrence (Larry) Page | 19,971,900 |
| 3 | Blackrock Inc. | 19,432,407 |
| 4 | Sergey Brin | 19,186,900 |
| 5 | Price (T.Rowe) Associates Inc | 13,284,493 |
Google founders net worth
21. As of May 2021, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are worth over $100 billion each, making them the 7th and 8th richest people in the world just behind Warren Buffet.
| 1 | Jeff Bezos | $189B |
| 2 | Bernard Arnault | $168B |
| 3 | Elon Musk | $167B |
| 4 | Bill Gates | $143B |
| 5 | Mark Zuckerberg | $122B |
| 6 | Warren Buffet | $109B |
| 7 | Larry Page | $108B |
| 8 | Sergey Brin | $104B |
How many employees does Google have?
22. Google’s first employee was Craig Silverstein, a fellow Ph.D. student at Stanford.
23. In 2021, Google had over 84,000 full-time employees in the US with offices in 26 US states.
24. At the end of 2020, Alphabet (Google) had 135,301 full-time employees globally.
25. Alphabet (Google) has 70 offices in over 50 countries, including Germany, Czech Republic, Finland, Canada, Mexico, Turkey, and New Zealand.
What is Google’s market share?
For the last 20 years, Google has dominated the search engine market.
26. In 2021, Google’s global market share was either 86.6% or 92.24% depending on the source.
| Statista (Feb 2021) | Statcounter (April 2021) | |
| 86.6% | 92.24% | |
| Bing | 6.7% | 2.29% |
| Yahoo! | 2.71% | 1.52% |
| Baidu | 0.54% | 1.48% |
| Yandex | 0.59% | 0.57% |
Google market share by country
Google dominates the worldwide market share of the Google Search Statistics, apart from China (where Google is banned and Baidu is dominant) and Russia (where Yandex is dominant).
27. Desktop traffic from search engines, by country in 2021:
| 1 | India | 95.45% |
| 2 | Brazil | 92.58% |
| 3 | Spain | 91.97% |
| 4 | Italy | 91.34% |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 91.12% |
| 6 | Australia | 90.23% |
| 7 | Canada | 88.38% |
| 8 | South Korea | 87.25% |
| 9 | United Kingdom | 86.36% |
| 10 | Germany | 83.9% |
| 11 | France | 83.48% |
| 12 | United States | 82.95% |
| 13 | Japan | 75.71% |
| 14 | Russia | 48.78% |
| 15 | China | 5.03% |
How many people use Google?
28. There are 246 million unique Google users in the US.
29. Google has 4.3 billion users worldwide. Based on 4.72 billion internet users worldwide and a market share of 92.24%.
30. In April 2021, Google had estimated unique visitors of 3.5 billion in the US.
Semrush Data, May 2021.
31. In 2020, Google search traffic surged by 22% compared to 2019 for the 1,000 most visited websites in the world.
How many Google searches are there?
32. Google has over 40,000 search queries per second.
33. Google has over 3.5 billion searches per day.
34. Google has 1.2 trillion searches per year.
Length of Google search queries
35. In January 2021, in the US:
40% of online searches had 2 words
22.74% of online searches had 3 words
Google search index size
The full size of Google’s index is difficult to measure and quantify to a specific number. By Google’s own admission:
36. The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size.
37. There is an assumption that 30% of the pages Google discovers are spam.
What is most searched on Google?
38. The most searched person on Google is Donald Trump.
| US | Global | ||
| Trump | 11.4m | Trump | 21.2m |
| Bernie Sanders | 9.1m | James Naismith* | 15.3m |
| James Naismith* | 5.6m | Mia Khalifa | 14.6m |
| Tiger Woods | 5.6m | Elon Musk | 13.0m |
| Tom Brady | 5.1m | The Weeknd | 12.7m |
March 2021, Semrush data
*James Naismith, the founder of basketball was honoured in a Google Doodle on January 14th, 2021.
39. The most searched word on Google is YouTube
| US | Global | ||
| YouTube | 173.7m | YouTube | 1.4b |
| 173.7m | 1.2b | ||
| Amazon | 124.0m | 580.7m | |
| Weather | 95.0m | Whatsapp Web | 543.3m |
| 78.1m | Gmail | 475.3m |
March 2021, Semrush data
Most visited websites
40. Google is the most visited website in the US with a massive 335% more traffic than the second most visited site.
| 1 | Google.com | 17.37b |
| 2 | YouTube.com | 3.99b |
| 3 | Facebook.com | 3.65b |
| 4 | Amazon.com | 3.19b |
| 5 | Wikipedia.org | 3.01b |
April 2021, Semrush data
Google click through rate by ranking position
41. The position of ranking on the Google search engine result page has a big impact on the amount of clicks you can achieve. With first-place having 144% more clicks than second.
Position One: 30.2%
Position Two: 12.33%
Position Three: 7.77%
Position Four: 4.23%
Position Five: 2.78%
Other Google search statistics and the economy they support
42. In 2020, Google Search, Google Play, YouTube, and Google advertising tools helped provide $426 billion of economic activity for more than 2 million businesses in the US.
43. In 2020, Google’s core search and advertising tools helped support an estimated £55 billion in economic activity for over 700,000 businesses in the UK. In total, we estimate that Google supports over £60 billion in the UK economy.
44. 71% of Brits said that they found Google Search gave more relevant results than other search engines.
45. On an average day in the UK:
- 3.6 million people will use Google Search to look for a job
- 3.2 million people will use YouTube to learn about fitness or health
- 3.7 million people will use Google Maps to find a local business
46. Local searches are almost half of all searches with 46% of all Google searches looking for local information. So, you might want to improve your visibility on Google My Business.
As a final note, Google is constantly driving for a better user experience and pushing for an increase in page speeds for all websites because:
47. Slow websites are a turn-off, 53% of users will abandon a page if it takes more than three seconds to load.