The pervasiveness of Google
Research by Ofcom into how children are embracing the internet puts Google firmly at the top of the list of sites most used by children and teenagers, with Google's YouTube also figuring in the top ten.
Other sites making it into the upper echeclons of popularity with children and teenagers include Facebook, Ebay, Disney Online and, surprisingly, the BBC. Wikipedia, often cited as a source of misinformation in homework and essays, is down at position 24, some six places behind online book retailer Amazon, so perhaps the young appreciate books and quality information more than they are given credit for.
Of more concern is the impressions and understanding of how search engines work and how they order their results on the page. About one third of the children in the survey thought that the most relevant and useful results appeared at the top of the list which is, of course, what good search engines aim to provide. However, almost as many believed that the results at the top of the list were the most accurate and truthful websites. Children are not alone though in being uncertain how search engines work. In a recent study of around 1500 Google users by Dutch research company, First Focus, an astonishing 45% of participants did not know the difference between the search results and the sponsored links.
Google continues to enjoy complete and utter dominance of the search market, and is so firmly entrenched that even giants like Microsoft struggle to maintain a toe-hold in the market. Despite all the fanfare at the launch of Microsoft's Bing back in May, it has still seen an 8% drop in its first-page advertising over the last quarter. Meanwhile, Google takes a massive 81% market share of the search engine advertising business. Some search analysts are saying that Bing provides better search results than Google, and the conversion rate for advertising is significantly better on both Bing and Yahoo than it is on Google, but the pervasiveness of Google still makes it the first choice for people placing adverts.
A two-year traffic study by Arbor Networks confirms that the internet is becoming more Google-centric. The study of 256 Exabytes-worth of traffic data (an exabyte is one billion gigabytes) is easily the largest ever conducted and according to Arbor's figures, Google alone now accounts for 6% of all internet traffic. Many people do not realise the sheer size of the Google network and still imagine it to be one large computer somewhere. Google has at least 36 warehouse-sized data centres at the latest count, which includes 18 scattered down the east and west coasts of the USA, and a dozen in Europe. No-one outside Google knows for sure how many processors are packed into each data centre, but recent estimates suggest Google operates around 700,000 servers worldwide. Google has presented plans for enhancing its network to give it the capability of managing between one million and ten million servers in the coming years, and something like an exabyte of disk storage spread across hundreds or even thousands of locations, making it by far the biggest and most powerful distributed computer system in the world.
If those figures prove to be accurate, we are talking about one Google server for every 7000 people on the planet. That's a lot of processing capacity for a company which doesn't actually produce any content of its own, and possibly it gives Google the biggest carbon footprint in the world.
28th October 2009
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.