I was wondering how much it costs Google to perform a single search. So I searched in Google, and was not able to find any readily available data that looked reliable. So I used up the better part of Saturday morning working on creating my own number.
I was able to find some ComScore data on total searches from July 2009, and I got Google's financials from 2009 from the SEC site.
My calculation? I estimate that it costs Google .68 cents per search in July 2009 in direct costs, and another .50 cents in overall operating costs, or a total of 1.18 cents per search. That's considerably more than I would have expected. (Please check my math and sources!)
I also found that for 78 billion searches in the month of July 2009, Google needed 3.442 B of capital equipment to support those searches. (Excludes YouTube and other non-search capital). Thus each search performed that month needed 4.4 cents of capital equipment. I did notice on Google's later financials that their capital costs didn't go up that much, so their capital cost per search is likely dropping. (plummeting?)
I'm wondering if anyone has newer data or more accurate data that they could plug in? Please let me know in the comments section.
Here is a summary of my estimate:
Summary
July 2009
Source
Notes
Worldwide Google Searches K
76,684,000
Age 15+ Home & Work Worldwide
Cost of Revenues $K
$519,456
Represents 70% that is search related
Direct Cost/Search
$0.0068
Calculated
Search Related Operating Costs $K
$383,808
Note: Click on Income Statement
Op Cost/Search
$0.0050
Calculated
Total Cost Per Search
$0.0118
Calculated
July 2009 - My estimate
Capital Required $K
$3,442,244
Represents 70% that is search related
Cap/Per Search $
$0.0449
Calculated
Google Q3 09 Monthly Revenue $K
$1,981,000
2009 Q3 earnings release
Not quite true, but I'm assuming all revenue from search
Revenue Per Search
$0.025
Cap/Per MM Searches/Mo
$44,889
Calculated
$44K of capital gets you 1 million searches/mo capacity
(that’s 33K searches a day; 1.4K searches/hr
23 searches/minute - hmmm. Seems like a lot of
capital to support just 23 searches per minute! Remember, though; this includes the cost to index the ENTIRE WORLD of web pages to support those searches.
# Seconds in a Month
2,592,000
Searches Per Second
29,585
In July 2009
K Searches/Sec
29.6
Cap Cost per K Search/sec
116,351,464
It takes $116 million in capital to support 1,000 searches per second and the indexes to all the web pages in the world (roughly)
Attached below is a PDF of my background calculations. This PDF was made from an Apple Numbers Spreadsheet.
Here is the Apple Numbers Spreadsheet with all my source information. Please let me know if you find errors. Apple Numbers is nice because it lets you combine many spreadsheets on one "canvas."
Here is the Excel spreadsheet that Numbers generates for compatibility. I regret I didn't name the tables before exporting, but you'll get the idea as you click to the various tables. (Note: There may be problems with the Posterous viewer for this file type, so if you can't see this file, it isn't you! Also, for some reason, Posterous only lets you view the Excel file, while it lets you download the Numbers file.)
Update: 6PM 1-15-2010
Top 10 Search Providers for February 2010, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)
Rank
Provider
Searches (000)
Share of Searches
All Search
9,174,408
100.0%
1
Google Search
5,980,116
65.2%
2
Yahoo! Search
1,294,261
14.1%
3
MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search
1,142,344
12.5%
4
AOL Search
206,969
2.3%
5
Ask.com Search
175,074
1.9%
6
My Web Search Search
91,288
1.0%
7
Comcast Search
55,122
0.6%
8
Yellow Pages Search
27,002
0.3%
9
NexTag Search
26,461
0.3%
10
WhitePages.com Network Search
24,681
0.3%
Source: The Nielsen Company
They show Google having done 9.2 billion searches in the US in February 2010, vs 78 billion searches worldwide for Google reported by ComScore for July 2009.
This ComScore data shows that North America (more than just the US) represents 22.1% of worldwide search traffic. By this ratio, the Nielson US ranking divided by .22 would be 26.8 billion searches worldwide for Google if the US represented all of North America. If the US represents 50% of North America, then the Nielson data represents a worldwide number of 53.6 billion searches worldwide.
Worldwide Search Market Overview by Region
July 2009
Total Worldwide – Age 15+, Home/Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Searches (MM)
Share (%) of Searches
Search Usage Days Per Searcher
Searches Per Searcher
Worldwide
113,685
100.0%
11.0
103.3
Europe
36,446
32.1%
11.8
116.9
Asia Pacific
35,001
30.8%
9.3
84.7
North America
25,095
22.1%
12.5
110.6
Latin America
10,524
9.3%
13.0
130.4
Middle East - Africa
6,619
5.8%
10.5
97.3